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THOMAS DE QUINCEY 



J^eatlj'flf (iBnglt^t) Cto0ic0 
DE QUINCEY'S 



JOAN OF ARC 

AND THE 

ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 

EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
BY 

CHAELES MAURICE STEBBINS, A.M. 

TEACHER OF ENGLISH, BOTS' HIGH SCHOOL, 
BROOKLYN 



BOSTON, U.S.A. 

D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS 

1907 



J< 






A 



LIBRARY of COMGRESS 
Two Cooies Rtjceived 

AUG 28 »90^ 

Oooyricht Entry 

CLASS^^ AXc, No. 

COPY B. 



Copyright, 1907, 
By D. C. Heath & Co. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



A Sketch of De Quincey vii 

The Romantic Revival in English Literature . , . xvii 

JOAN OF ARC I 

THE ENGLISH. MAIL-COACH . . . . . .47 

Notes : 

Joan of Arc 120 

The English Mail-Coach 129 



A SKETCH OF DE QUINCEY 

Thomas De Quincey, one of the most singular and, at the same 
time, one of the most interesting personalities connected with the 
annals of English literature, was born in Manchester, August 15, 
1785. His long life, covering a period of nearly three-quarters of 
a century, was a strange mixture of wild romance and terrible 
reality. The ordinary conventionalities and responsibilities of life 
never made any appeal to his eccentric nature. From a home of 
plenty he ran away and wandered half-clothed, half-starved, and 
ill, an outcast in the wretched streets of London. After spending 
four years at Oxford, taking the written tests for his degree, he 
disappeared mysteriously without presenting himself for the neces- 
sary oral examination. He borrowed without remembering to 
repay and lent without ever thinking of being repaid. A fifty- 
pound note was no more to him, even as a grown man, than a 
shilling, if the latter was sufficient to supply his immediate wants. 

By nature this remarkable man was timid, sensitive, wilful, and 
fanciful. His childhood was filled with weird fancies, extraordi- 
nary sensations, and wonderful visions. In later years he could 
recall incidents that occurred before he was two years old. One 
of these he describes in his Autobiographic Sketches as " a remark- 
able dream of terrific grandeur about a favorite nurse." Again he 
tells us of the melancholy impression made upon him by the 
muffled whisper that ran through the house on the occasion of the 
death of his second sister. Four years later the death of his favor- 
ite sister Elizabeth, who had been his constant companion, over- 
whelmed him with gloom. That night he shpped away unnoticed 
and stole upstairs where this gentle and best-loved being lay. He 
stood awed in the presence of death, the meaning of which began 
slowly to steal over him, and as he continued gazing at the angel 

vii 



viii THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

face upon the pillow, a solemn wind began to blow, " the saddest 
ear ever heard," and — 

" A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a 
shaft which ran up forever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that 
also ran up the shaft forever ; and the billows seemed to pursue 
the throne of God ; but that also ran on before us and fled away 
continually. The flight and pursuit seemed to go on for ever and 
ever. Frost gathering frost, some sarsar wind of death seemed to 
repel me ; some mighty relation between God and death dimly 
struggled to evolve itself from the dreadful antagonism between 
them ; shadowy meanings even yet continued to exercise and tor- 
ment, in dreams, the deciphering oracle within me. I slept — for 
how long I cannot say : slowly I recovered my self-possession ; 
and when I woke, found myself standing as before, close to my 
sister's bed." 

While Thomas was still an infant, the De Quincey family had 
moved to a country place near Manchester, and the lad passed the 
whole of his youth in rural seclusion. The first country home, 
which De Quincey describes as a "pretty rustic dwelUng," was 
called The Farm. In 1791 or 1792 the family moved to a more 
commodious country house, known as Greenhay, about two miles 
out of Manchester. During these early years the shy and sensitive 
boy was accustomed only to the society of girls and women. His 
father, who was a well-to-do merchant, was compelled by poor 
health to spend a large part of his time abroad, and his brother 
was away at school. The boy's natural timidity and delicate health 
made him averse to the sports of more vigorous boys. Conse- 
quently even at this early age he lived shut up by himself in a 
world of his own, a world of fancy. He loved nature, solitude, and 
books. He was fascinated with the Arabian Nights, with certain 
biblical narratives, and with narratives from history. 

"When Thomas was about six years old, his education was in- 
trusted to a minister of Manchester, and the lad had to walk to the 
city every day to recite his lessons. Although this was not exactly 
to his tastes, it was endurable to him, and he became well 
grounded in Latin and Greek. But, for another reason, the two 



A SKETCH OF DE QCINCEY ix 

years that followed were like a terrible nightmare to the boy. His 
brother William, " whose genius for mischief amounted to inspira- 
tion," returned home, and from the hour of his arrival to the day 
of his departure two years later, Thomas knew hardly a moment's 
quietude. This " horrid pugilistic brother," " the son of eternal 
racket," was a lad whom the youthful Scott would have taken to his 
heart at once, but to Thomas De Quincey he was an unendurable 
tyrant. The brother was in continual warfare with the boys of a fac- 
tory which Thomas had to pass every day on his way to his tutor's, 
and the timid little creature was compelled to take part in the daily 
battles. There were, besides, imaginary conflicts, hair-raising ghost 
stories, and tragic theatricals that kept Thomas in a continual 
state of terror. 

The two terrible years came at last to an end; William left home 
again. In 1796 the family household at Greenhay was broken up 
and the property sold. Mrs. De Quincey moved to Bath, and 
Thomas was sent to the grammar school at that place. Four years 
later, although Thomas considered himself prepared to enter Oxford, 
his guardians decided to send him to the Manchester Grammar 
School for three years. They hoped that at the end of that period 
he would be able to obtain a scholarship at Oxford. The condi- 
tions, however, were intolerable to the freedom-loving boy, and he 
decided to run away. He wrote to Lady Carbery — an accomplished 
woman at whose home he had previously spent three months study- 
ing Greek and talking theology — asking for a loan of five pounds 
to add to the two which he already had. She generously sent him 
ten. In his Cojifessions he tells of the careful preparations that 
he made and of his fears lest he should be discovered as he stole 
away in the early morning, with a volume of a favorite English poet 
in one pocket and Euripides in the other. 

His first intention was to make a journey to the English Lakes to 
see Wordsworth, whom he held in reverence as a great poet. He 
appreciated, however, the folly of presenting himself as a runaway 
schoolboy before the object of his admiration, and after some con- 
sideration decided to visit his mother. Through the intercession 
of an uncle, he was given an allowance of a guinea a week and 



X THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

permitted to go on a tour of Wales. He wandered about from 
town to town, from country-side to country-side, sometimes sleeping 
in the best inns, sometimes in the cottages of the simple Welsh 
peasants, and not infrequently in barns or among the ferns under 
the open sky. 

Even this free, romantic existence was too conventional for him. 
He chafed under restraint and longed to be absolutely free; so he 
decided to sever the remaining ties that bound him to his family 
and his guardians, and work out his own destiny. Accordingly, all 
communications with home ceased. He forsook his weekly allow- 
ance, and, borrowing a few guineas from friends, set out for Lon- 
don. He hoped to borrow money on his expectations of inheritance 
and began negotiations with the Jews of London. But delay 
followed delay until the last farthing was gone, and the young lad, 
frail in health, was reduced to absolute want. He slept upon door- 
steps until driven away by the watchman, and in vacant tenements, 
partaking of the charity of others as destitute as himself. Finally 
he was discovered by his friends, a reconciliation took place between 
him and his guardians, and he was sent to Oxford. 

He entered Worcester College in December, 1803, and kept up 
an irregular residence there till 1808, his name remaining on the 
books till 1 810. To Oxford he makes scanty reference in his writ- 
ings. His life there passed so quietly that not much is known about 
it. It is evident that he made little impression on professors and 
fellow-students and still more evident that they in general made 
little impression on him. Here, however, he became impressed 
more than ever by the greatness of Enghsh literature, and undertook 
a systematic study of it as a whole. To him it was a literature of 
glorious movements, and now it was becoming glorious again through 
Wordsworth and the disciples of Romanticism. To this new litera- 
ture he turned with enthusiasm, and it was in response to this 
movement that he, in later years, produced much of his best 
work. 

While at Oxford he wrote to Wordsworth expressing his admira- 
tion of the poet's work, and in reply received letters which en- 
couraged him in his desire to meet the author of the Lyrical 



A SKETCH OF DE QUINCEY xi 

Ballads. His interest was growing, too, in Coleridge, who won 
his admiration by his prose as well as by his poetic works. More- 
over, Coleridge was a friend of the adored Wordsworth. In 1807 
his long-cherished desires were fulfilled. He met Coleridge at 
Bridgewater, and a friendship was formed that proved valuable to 
both, a friendship in many ways remarkable. It was not long before 
this friendship led to De Quincey's meeting Wordsworth and his 
sister Dorothy. He spent two days in the Wordsworth home. 
Two years later, when the poet moved to more commodious quarters 
at Allan Bank, his old home at Grasmere was fitted up for De 
Quincey. 

It was during De Quincey's life at Oxford that he first took opium. 
He was accustomed to visit London frequently. On one of these 
occasions, in 1804, during rainy weather, he suffered intense pain 
from neuralgia. A friend recommended the use of opium. He 
followed the advice and purchased a small phial of the drug at a 
shop in Oxford Street. The marvellous visions, the wonderful sen- 
sations that resulted, caused him to enter upon a course of experi- 
ments with the magic potion, and from that time he was never for any 
considerable time without it. During his Oxford life he used to 
make careful preparations for what he called an opium debauch 
about every three weeks. The remarkable experiences with opium 
during this period were, a few years later, depicted in one of 
the most notable literary productions of the age. This work, The 
Confessions of an English Opium- Eater, 2X once placed De Quincey 
before the reading public as an unique literary figure, and assured 
his success with his contemporaries. 

His pecuniary circumstances improved during the last years at 
Oxford, either because he had come into his inheritance or because 
he had finally succeeded in borrowing of the Jews of London on his 
future prospects. He was able to go and come as he pleased. He 
spent much time in London, where he formed the acquaintance of 
Charles Lamb. His favorite pastimes in the metropolis were attend- 
ing the opera and wandering through the markets on Saturday 
nights, a sohtary observer of the throngs of jostling men and 



xii THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

It was in 1809 that he removed to the Lakes, occupying the 
Grasmere cottage that the Wordsworths had left. Here De Quincey 
became an intimate companion, a close observer, rather than a real 
member of the literary brotherhood that had made the English 
Lakes famous, — Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. He filled 
his house with books and settled down to a life of ease and study. 

Something of his tastes and manner of life may be gathered from 
the following description of his "den " by himself : — 

" Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than 
seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously 
styled in my family the drawing-room ; but being contrived ' a double 
debt to pay,' it is also, and more justly, termed the library, for it happens 
that books are the only article of property in which I am richer than my 
neighbours. Of these I have about five thousand, collected gradually 
since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as many as you can 
into this room. Make it populous with books ; and, furthermore, paint 
me a good fire; and furniture plain and modest, befitting the unpretend- 
ing cottage of a scholar. And near the fire paint me a tea-table ; and 
(as it is clear that no creature can come to see one such a stormy night) 
place only two cups and saucers on the tea-tray ; and if you know how 
to paint such a thing symbolically, or otherwise, paint me an eternal 
tea-pot, — eternal a parte mite, and a parte post, — for I usually drink tea 
from eight o'clock at night to four o'clock in the morning. . . . The 
next article brought forward should naturally be myself — a picture of 
the Opium-Eater, with his ' little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug' 
lying beside him on the table. . . . No ; you may as well paint the real 
receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and as much like a wine- 
decanter as possible. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-coloured 
laudanum ; that, and a book of German Metaphysics placed by its side, 
will sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood." 

His companionship with the great poets was close. He read 
with them, conversed with them, and rambled through the fields 
with them. He frolicked with the children of Wordsworth, becom- 
ing so attached to them that their grief was his, and when the 
poet's little daughter died, he was inconsolable. Another of his 
friends at this period was John Wilson, the subsequent " Christopher 
North " of Blackwood's Magazine. With this man, who was about 



A SKETCH OF DE QUINCEY xiii 

De Quincey's own age but twice his size and strong and manly in ap- 
pearance, the little Opium-Eater used to go on interminable rambles 
across country during the evening hours. De Quincey was inde- 
fatigable both as a walker and a talker, and the Giant and 
the Dwarf were mutually agreeable and instructive. 

In 1816 De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, and for a time 
limited his consumption of opium, which had become enormous. 
The additional demands made upon him for money caused him to 
think seriously of turning to literature as a source of income. He 
aroused himself for a time, contributed a few articles to the maga- 
zines, became interested in political economy, wrote some articles 
on that subject, and then plunged again into the depths of opium 
degradation and despondency. 

Awakened again to the needs of his family, he went to Edinburgh 
to find employment as a contributor to the magazines, but returned 
without any definite prospects. In 1821 he decided to try London, 
and his venture met with success. The September number of the 
London Magazine contained the first part of the Confessions of an 
English Opium-Eater. Popular favor came immediately. For 
about seven years he contributed more or less regularly to this peri- 
odical and to Kttighfs Qtcarierly Magazine. His contributions 
were essays that dealt with English or German literature and philoso- 
phy. It was during this period that he succeeded in getting several 
articles into Blackwood's through the influence of Professor Wilson, 
his companion of the Lakes. Among the first of these articles was 
his fantastic piece, Murder Considered as One of the Eine Arts. 
The years 1 827-1 829 were divided between Grasmere and Edin- 
burgh, and in 1830 the family moved to the latter place. 

The metropolis of Scotland was at this time a very interesting 
place. The pleasant social activities that had attracted people to 
Edinburgh for a century and more were still a characteristic feature 
of the life of the picturesque old town. Through the influence of 
Scott, and the great reviews established during recent years, it had 
risen also to a place of considerable influence and importance as a 
literary centre. There were many men of note — university pro- 
fessors, authors, and jurists— who took a lively interest in affairs 



xii THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

It was in 1809 that he removed to the Lakes, occupying the 
Grasmere cottage that the Wordsworths had left. Here De Quincey 
became an intimate companion, a close observer, rather than a real 
member of the literary brotherhood that had made the English 
Lakes famous, — Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. He filled 
his house with books and settled down to a life of ease and study. 

Something of his tastes and manner of life may be gathered from 
the following description of his "den " by himself : — 

" Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than 
seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously 
styled in my family the drawing-room ; but being contrived ' a double 
debt to pay,' it is also, and more justly, termed the library, for it happens 
that books are the only article of property in which I am richer than my 
neighbours. Of these I have about five thousand, collected gradually 
since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as many as you can 
into this room. Make it populous with books ; and, furthermore, paint 
me a good fire; and furniture plain and modest, befitting the unpretend- 
ing cottage of a scholar. And near the fire paint me a tea-table ; and 
(as it is clear that no creature can come to see one such a stormy night) 
place only two cups and saucers on the tea-tray ; and if you know how 
to paint such a thing symbolically, or otherwise, paint me an eternal 
tea-pot, — eternal a parte a?ife, and a parte post, — for I usually drink tea 
from eight o'clock at night to four o'clock in the morning. , . . The 
next article brought forward should naturally be myself — a picture of 
the Opium-Eater, with his ' little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug ' 
lying beside him on the table. . . . No; you may as well paint the real 
receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and as much like a wine- 
decanter as possible. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-coloured 
laudanum ; that, and a book of German Metaphysics placed by its side, 
will sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood." 

His companionship with the great poets was close. He read 
with them, conversed with them, and rambled through the fields 
with them. He frolicked with the children of Wordsworth, becom- 
ing so attached to them that their grief was his, and when the 
poet's little daughter died, he was inconsolable. Another of his 
friends at this period was John Wilson, the subsequent " Christopher 
North " of Blackwood's Magazine, With this man, who was about 



A SKETCH OF DE QUINCEY xiii 

De Quincey's own age but twice his size and strong and manly in ap- 
pearance, the little Opium-Eater used to go on interminable rambles 
across country during the evening hours. De Quincey was inde- 
fatigable both as a walker and a talker, and the Giant and 
the Dwarf were mutually agreeable and instructive. 

In 1816 De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, and for a time 
limited his consumption of opium, which had become enormous. 
The additional demands made upon him for money caused him to 
think seriously of turning to literature as a source of income. He 
aroused himself for a time, contributed a few articles to the maga- 
zines, became interested in political economy, wrote some articles 
on that subject, and then plunged again into the depths of opium 
degradation and despondency. 

Awakened again to the needs of his family, he went to Edinburgh 
to find employment as a contributor to the magazines, but returned 
without any definite prospects. In 1821 he decided to try London, 
and his venture met with success. The September number of the 
London Magazine contained the first part of the Confessions of an 
English Opium-Eater, Popular favor came immediately. For 
about seven years he contributed more or less regularly to this peri- 
odical and to Knighfs Quarterly Magazine. His contributions 
were essays that dealt with English or German literature and philoso- 
phy. It was during this period that he succeeded in getting several 
articles into Blackwood's through the influence of Professor Wilson, 
his companion of the Lakes. Among the first of these articles was 
his fantastic piece, Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. 
The years 1 827-1 829 were divided between Grasmere and Edin- 
burgh, and in 1830 the family moved to the latter place. 

The metropolis of Scotland was at this time a very interesting 
place. The pleasant social activities that had attracted people to 
Edinburgh for a century and more were still a characteristic feature 
of the life of the picturesque old town. Through the influence of 
Scott, and the great reviews established during recent years, it had 
risen also to a place of considerable influence and importance as a 
literary centre. There were many men of note — university pro- 
fessors, authors, and jurists— who took a lively interest in affairs 



xiv THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

literary and political. This city with its one hundred and forty 
thousand inhabitants had a strong interest for the great novelist who 
was just drawing to the close of his career. What influence did it 
exert over the retiring little Opium-Eater, the Englishman, the 
dreamer, the lover of books? We shall see that it had very 
little. 

At this time De Quincey was forty-five years old. His tastes 
continued to be what they had been since his youth. His chief 
delight was in study and imaginative speculation. His large family, 
now numbering eight children, made it imperative, however, for 
him to exert himself in the production of an income. As a con- 
sequence, these years were given largely to study and writing. The 
social and political stir of Edinburgh held out no allurements for 
him : indeed, his timidity rather led him to avoid all society except 
that of a few select souls who were his intimates. These sought 
him often, to enjoy the charms of his brilliant and impressive con- 
versation. 

During the first ten years of the Edinburgh period, the family 
establishment was kept up in the town, and the little recluse, who 
was doubtless the greatest literary figure in the city, came and went 
through the quaint streets unnoticed and unknown. Few of the 
inhabitants were aware of his presence in the city. This may be 
accounted for in part by the retiring habits of the man, in part by 
the fact that the affairs of ordinary daily life had no interest for him, 
and in part by the frequent movings. So frequent were the changes 
of residence during this period that it is now impossible to follow 
them. 

Although De Quincey was in many ways irresponsible as the head 
of the house, he was a kind father and husband. He is described 
as the gentlest of beings, incapable of saying a word that would 
wound any one's feelings. He had a great affection for his children 
and bestowed much time and attention on them. One of his 
daughters relates that among her earliest recollections are the even- 
ings she spent with her father in his study, where he would place 
her in a chair and give her things to amuse her while he was writ- 
ing. He took sole charge of the education of his eldest son, who 



A SKETCH OF DE QUINCEY xv 

at the age of sixteen was proficient in the use of Greek metres and had 
made an original commentary on Suetonius. Afflictions resulted in 
the separation of De Quincey from his family for long periods during 
the latter part of his life. The wife and two children, the youngest 
and the eldest sons, died. For the sake of economy the remain- 
ing children, six in number, rented a cottage at Lasswade, seven 
miles from Edinburgh, and the father took lodgings in the 
town. 

The sorrows he passed through and the resulting changes in his 
life increased the already pronounced eccentricities of De Quincey. 
He became more absent-minded and incompetent than ever. He 
was an omnivorous reader, and consequently collected papers and 
books of all kinds. These he strewed about his lodgings, piling 
them on the floor, in the windows, on chairs, and on the table, 
where he reserved only a space large enough for his writing. 
"When the room became so crowded that he could no longer move 
about, he locked the door and engaged other lodgings, where he 
began over again. This process he repeated several times. 

About his dress he was no less careless. The following descrip- 
tion by J. R. Findlay, to be found in Hogg's De Quincey and his 
Friends, furnishes a good idea of the man at this time : — 

" His clothes had generally a look of extreme age, and also of having 
been made for a person somewhat larger than himself. I believe the 
real cause of this was that he had got much thinner in those later years, 
whilst he wore, and did wear, I suppose, till the end of his life, the 
clothes that had been made for him years before. I have sometimes 
seen appearances about him of a shirt and shirt-collar, but usually there 
were no indications of these articles of dress. When I came to visit 
him in his lodgings, I saw him in all stages of costume ; sometimes he 
would come in to me from his bedroom to his parlour, as on this occa- 
sion, with shoes, but no stockings, and sometimes with stockings, but 
no shoes. When in bed, where I also saw him from time to time, he 
wore a large jacket — not exactly an under-jacket, but a jacket made in 
the form of a coat, of white flannel ; something like a cricketer's coat, 
in fact. In the street his appearance was equally singular. He walked 
with considerable rapidity (he said walking was the only athletic exer- 
cise in which he had ever excelled) and with an odd, one-sided, and 



xvi THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

yet straightforward motion, moving his legs only, and neither his arms, 
head, nor any other part of his body — like Wordsworth's cloud — 

' Moving altogether, if he moved at all.' 
His hat, which had the antediluvian aspect characteristic of the rest of 
his clothes, was generally stuck on the back of his head, and no one 
who ever met that antiquated figure, with that strangely dreamy and 
intellectual face, working its way rapidly, and with an oddly deferential 
air, through any of the streets of Edinburgh, — a sight certainly by no 
means common, for he was very seldom to be seen in town, — could 
ever forget it." 

The last period of De Quincey's life — that between 1840, when 
the children removed to Lasswade, and his death in 1859 — was 
divided between Lasswade, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. For long 
periods at a time, he walked back and forth between Edinburgh 
and Lasswade; at other periods, he spent his time entirely in his 
city lodgings. He made long visits to Glasgow. In 1847 ^^ had 
lodgings there, while he took part in establishing the Nor//i British 
Daily Mail and in the transfer of Taifs Magazine from Edinburgh 
to that city. Up to 1849 contributions by De Quincey appeared 
with considerable frequency in both Blackwood's and Taifs. After 
this date De Quincey contributed several articles, though for the 
ii}Ost part of little importance, to Hogg's Weekly Instructor. In 
1853 he began to revise his works for the Collective Edition. The 
fourteenth and last volume of this edition appeared in i860, the 
year after De Quincey's death. 

De Quincey's merit as a writer had been recognized early in his 
literary career; but it was during the Edinburgh period that he 
may be said to have become noted. The little cottage at Lasswade 
became the shrine of many literary pilgrimages; and many inter- 
esting accounts have been given by visitors of this kindly little 
man, with his eccentric ways, his impressive voice, and his remark- 
able powers of conversation. 



THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL IN 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 



The emotional movement in literature during the first quarter of 
the nineteenth century, known as the Romantic Revival, had its 
beginnings a century earlier in the midst of the age of prose and 
of reason; and, to understand fully this Romantic Revival, it is 
necessary to know something of that way of thinking and writing 
against which it was in the first place a protest and then a revolt. 

The Classical Spirit of the Eighteenth Century. — With the Res- 
toration in 1660 the classical influence over English writers became 
dominant. The imagination and the emotions were put under the 
ban, and reason took their place. Men no longer were influenced to 
write because of strong emotions, but because their judgments, or 
what they termed common sense, dictated to them. The result was 
that they imposed arbitrary restrictions upon literature, and began 
" To smoothe, inlay, and clip, and fit, 
Till like the certain wands of Jacob's wit 
Their verses tallied." — Sleep and Poetry, KEATS. 
The heroic couplet was adopted as the true medium of poetry; 
and within its narrow limits writers were to work out the ideals 
of art, which were considered to be grace, wit, simplicity, restraint, 
and perfection of form. 

The restrictions placed upon the subject-matter of literature were 
as severe as those imposed upon form. These restrictions, how- 
ever, were as much a natural result of the tastes and social fashions 
of the age as they were an outcome of deliberate judgment. Soci- 
ety forsook the wonders of the natural world and the romance of 
the Middle Ages, and centred its interest upon itself. And this 
self was doubtless the most conventional, the most sophisticated 



xviii THOMAS DE OUINCEY 

society that England has ever known. Pope expressed the pre- 
vailing belief of his day in the line, — 

" The proper study of mankind is man." 

This study, moreover, became restricted largely to externals, to 
manners and customs, the conventions of the day. The inner man 
was a closed book, which the classicists had no interest in opening. 
This study inevitably produced a mood — a way of viewing 
things — and a method of treatment, foreign to average human 
nature in most ages. Men became coldly intellectual and looked 
upon the actions of their fellow-men, not with sympathy or any 
kind of genuine human interest, but rather with the idea of apply- 
ing the accepted standard and ascertaining how far short of it the 
subject fell. The method, therefore, was analytical and critical; 
and satire, social and political, was the most natural form of literary 
production. One other natural consequence of this critical mood 
was the loss of interest in the individual as such. Abstractions 
and generalities about man as a class completely overshadowed 
the importance of the individual man. The reaction against this 
spirit was one of the most powerful forces, though not the first, in 
the new movement which culminated in the first quarter of the 
nineteenth century. 

The Return to Nature. — The first sign of a reaction against the 
spirit of restraint and conventionality was manifested at the time 
when that spirit was most supreme. Pope had already brought 
the heroic couplet to its highest perfection. Correctness, ease, 
wit, and polish he had given it; nothing remained to be accom- 
plished. Much of his best work. The Essay on Criticism, The 
Rape of the Lock, the translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, had 
appeared and taken rank, m the minds of contemporaries, among 
the foremost productions of the language, when a young Scotch 
poet named James Thomson published a poem entitled Win- 
ter, which heralded the dawn of a new movement. His poem is 
reactionary, both in subject-matter and in form. It forsakes the 
conventional life of the city for the freedom of the country, and it 
adopts blank verse in place of the heroic couplet. 



THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xix 

Thomson's poem was published in 1726, and was followed bf 
Summer in 1727, Spring in 1728, and Autumn in 1730. Although 
these poems do not show any great personal passion for nature, 
they give evidence of an intimate acquaintance with natural scen- 
ery and natural phenomena that was in pleasing contrast with the 
stilted nature fictions of the author's contemporaries. Thomson 
was followed by a number of writers who wrote long didactic blank 
verse poems on such subjects as The Excursion, The Chase, The 
Pleasures of Imagination, The Art of Preserving Health, and 
Sugar Cane. It was not long, however, before there grew up a 
genuine sentiment for nature, which during the century found its 
best expression in the poems of Collins, Gray, Cowper, and Burns. 
This sentiment was combined with and influenced by a revival of 
interest in the past. 

The Return to the Past. — There were several ways in which a 
reviving interest in the past was shown during the progress of the 
eighteenth century. The first of these is the hold which the old 
ballads and songs took upon public taste. Early in the century 
several collections of popular songs and ballads appeared in England 
and Scotland, the most interesting of these being the collections of 
William Watson, an Edinburgh printer and bookseller. About the 
time that Thomson was writing the Seasons, another Scotchman, 
Allan Ramsay, brought out two collections known as The Tea- 
Table Miscellany and The Evergreen. In 1723 appeared two 
volumes of the Collection of Old Ballads, ascribed to Ambrose 
Philips, and a third volume was added in 1725. Collections and 
imitations of the old ballads multiplied from that period to the end 
of the century. The public was aroused to a strong interest in this 
old folk literature, with its naturalness of form, genuineness of feel- 
ing, and the unconventional manners of people who lived in close 
relation to nature. This poetry of spontaneous emotion is the 
extreme opposite of the conventional poetry of the age of Pope. 
Its influence continued into the nineteenth century. It is the same 
spirit that actuated Scott in collecting the Border Minstrelsy and 
in writing the best of his original poems, the same that led 
Coleridge to produce The Ancient Mariner and Christabel. 



XX THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

Closely connected with this ballad revival was a renewed interest 
in the olden times themselves, and especially in the great romance 
period of European history. Everything pertaining to the Middle 
Ages took hold of the reawakening imagination. Chivalry, the courts 
of love, the Gothic castle, and the mediceval cathedral were of 
absorbing interest. Poets celebrated the solemn music, the cloistral 
glooms, and the aspiring arches of the mediaeval cathedrals; novel- 
ists wove weird stories about the secret chambers and subterranean 
passages of Gothic castles; and antiquarians interested themselves 
in the trappings, armor, and weapons of the age of chivalry. 

The third phase of this renewed interest in the past showed itself 
in the revival of old authors. Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser, 
who had suffered neglect during the years of classical supremacy, 
came again into prominence. Not only were editions of their works 
produced and reproduced, but a host of imitators, especially of 
Milton and Spenser, did homage to these masters. One group of 
writers adopted the Spenserian stanza, and some of them managed 
to catch something of the spirit of the originator. Of Milton there 
were two groups of imitators : one group adopted blank verse as 
the medium for poetry and wrote dismal treatises; the other followed 
the earlier manner of the Puritan poet as revealed in L^ Allegro and 
IlPenseroso. The result was a company of versifiers sometimes known 
as the "IlPenseroso School." This school affected melancholy, 
seeking arched walks, twilight shades, cathedral glooms, and even 
sepulchral vaults. In the nineteenth century this melancholy strain 
found response in the heart of Byron. 

The Rise of Methodism. — An influence which, though not per- 
manently connected with literature, exercised a most powerful 
influence upon it was the Methodist movement in England under 
the leadership of Whitefield and the Wesleys. Reason had held 
the same sway over religion that it had over literature. Spiritu- 
ality had been crowded out and a strict formalism had taken its 
place. The inherent religious and emotional nature of the English 
people, however, could not be held forever in restraint, and when 
the barriers gave way, England was swept by a great wave of 



THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xxi 

emotional enthusiasm. The appeal of the Wesleys was directly 
to the heart and conscience of the individual. He was made re- 
sponsible, and through that personal responsibility he assumed 
greater importance. The Methodist revival, therefore, was one of 
the most powerful factors in the rise of individualism in literature 
and in government. 

The Spirit of Revolution. — Closely connected with the Methodist 
movement is the growth of the democratic spirit, which is in itself 
a revolution. The idea of human brotherhood and the dignity of 
manhood were doctrines which the religious awakening had fixed 
firmly in the minds of men. Abroad the same doctrines were 
preached, though from a different standpoint, by Rousseau. The 
rights of man, which may be said to have been the great passion of 
the English people during their whole history, now assumed a new 
interest. Men contended not only for their own rights, but for the 
rights of others. Prison reforms were brought about, the death 
penalty for paltry offences was revoked, slaves were freed, and the 
condemned murderer no longer served as a holiday spectacle. The 
revolutions in America and in France had a profound influence on 
this spirit in England, extending to religious and political circles, 
and pe'rvading also the literature of the period. Its influence is 
marked in the poetry of Cowper, Blake, and Burns of the eighteenth 
century, and in that of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley of the 
nineteenth. 

The Nineteenth Century. — The literature of the first third of the 
nineteenth century was the outgrowth of these reactionary tenden- 
cies which had been developing power during the whole eighteenth 
century. The allignment of forces was not the same, and none of 
the leaders of the movement represented all the eighteenth century 
tendencies, but all the tendencies were somewhere represented. 
The love of nature, the love for the old folk poetry, the interest in 
the age of chivalry, the spirit of melancholy, religious sincerity, 
emotional enthusiasm, the love of liberty and of one's fellow-men, 
the intense realization of the importance of the individual — all 
found a place in the poetry and prose of the early part of the 
century. 



xxii THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

The Poetry of the Period. — This literary epoch may be said to 
begin with the publication in 1798 of the Lyrical Ballads by 
Wordsworth (i 770-1850). The volume contained a few poems 
by Coleridge, among them being The Anciejit Mariner. Words- 
worth set out with the purpose of being a reformer both in subject- 
matter and in style. He chose incidents and situations from com- 
mon life, believing that in rustic life " the essential passions of the 
heart find fitter soil in which they can attain their maturity." 
Many of his poems are on simple subjects and in very simple lan- 
guage, but some of the longer poems, like The Prelude, and The 
Excursion, deal with philosophic ideas, and are written in a rich 
and stately language, though one entirely different from the con- 
ventional phraseology of the early eighteenth century against which 
he revolted. Wordsworth is the culmination of the nature lovers 
of the eighteenth century. Combined with his deep insight and 
sympathy for nature is the love of the simple manners of living 
and the genuine emotions that we find in the old ballads. 

Coleridge (1772-1834), the day-dreamer and the bookworm, 
is remembered chiefly as a poet, although by far the larger portion 
of his work is prose. His poetry belongs to his youth, and con- 
tains the spirit and vividness of youthful fancy. In form, in quali- 
ties of simplicity, directness, abruptness, repetition, and love of 
mystery, it shows the influence of the old ballads. In Coleridge's 
Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Ktibla Khan we have the cul- 
mination of the romantic love of mystery which grew up under 
the combined influence of the return to nature and the religious 
awakening. Coleridge's style is like magic. As Lowell says, 
"The most decrepit vocable in the language throws away its 
crutches to dance and sing at his piping." 

The third member of this group, known as the Lake School of 
Poets, was Robert Southey (i 774-1843). He reminds one 
much of De Quincey in his relation to these two great singers. 
He lived with them, worked with them, admired them, but was 
not of them. The volumes of verse which he produced, all on 
romantic subjects, are tales of wonder, but they are not poetry. 
He was a serious worker and did much in his day, but he is so far 



THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xxiii 

eclipsed by his genuinely inspired contemporaries that posterity 
thinks of him chiefly as a friend of greater poets. 

While Wordsworth and Coleridge were writing their lyrical bal- 
lads, ScoTi^ (1771-1832) was collecting Scotch ballads and trans- 
lating romantic poems of German authors. He came before the 
public in i8cK> with a border ballad, The Eve of St. John, In 
1805 appeared The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The Lay had been 
suggested by the Countess of Dalkeith, who sent Scott an old 
legend with the request that he turn it into a ballad. The form 
which the legend took, however, Scott says, was inspired by Cole- 
ridge's Christabel. The romantic characteristics of Scott's work as 
a poet are a passion for the old, for the ancient legends and tradi- 
tions of his native land; a love of wild natural scenery; a prone- 
ness to the supernatural; and a fondness for surprises and striking 
situations. 

Byron (i 788-1 824) rose rapidly to popularity, causing Scott 
to turn from poetry to prose. Byron was by birth an aristocrat, 
but in spirit he was a democrat, a revolutionist. He embodies in 
himself and in his work all the wild, fiery passions of the individual 
striving to free himself from the fetters of tradition and social and 
political bondage. More than this, his life and work are colored 
with the spirit of melancholy, which, worn as a cloak by many of 
the eighteenth-century writers and inherited as a disease by others, 
has now developed almost to a wild despair. 

The works that raised Byron to the height of popularity are 
The Giaotcr, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, and Para- 
sina, a series of wild romantic tales in which the spirit of indi- 
vidualism runs riot. The dashing, fiery style and the stirring 
adventures which they recount appealed strongly to the people 
of the poet's day. The Childe Harold recounts the pilgrimages 
of the hero, and affords opportunities for fine descriptions of nature, 
and for many poetic though melancholy reflections occasioned by 
the ruins of the past. Byron's work as a whole reflects the revo- 
lutionary movement of the age in which he lived. It is subjective, 
wild, cynical, melancholy, worldly, and brilliant. 

If Byron stands for the personal, self-assertive side of the forces 



xxiv • THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

of revolution, Shelley (i 792-1822) represents its ideals. He 
was inspired with a noble passion for justice and peace. These to 
him were obtainable only through the recognition of the laws of 
universal brotherhood. An intense yearning for the betterment 
of his fellow-men controlled his life. He was the son of an Eng- 
lish baronet, and grew up under the influence of aristocratic sur- 
roundings, but the spirit of the Revolution made a deep impression 
on him. He was attracted by its theory, its ideals, and he dedi- 
cated himself to its doctrines. 

Shelley's first work of great importance was Alastor, a poem in 
which he portrays the longings of a poetic soul toward its ideals of 
beauty and truth. It is full of intense feeling and a deep apprecia- 
tion of nature. This poem was followed in 181 8 by The Revolt of 
Jsla77i, a long romantic epic in the Spenserian stanza, which depicts 
the struggle of a youth and a maiden for freedom against a shadowy 
tyrant. The Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama written in 1819, 
is the noblest expression of faith in a new and better order of things 
that the Revolution produced. 

There is another side to Shelley's poetic gift that is not concerned 
with the spirit of the age. It is his lyrical power. In this field he 
has been unsurpassed. His lyrics are clear-toned and free, full of 
sweet music and light, airy motion. They are the songs of a buoy- 
ant heart and of a naturally reverent spirit. Nearly all of his long 
poems are lyrical, but the genuine lyrics. Ode to the West Wind, The 
Cloud, The Skylark, and The Sensitive Pla7it,zx^ the essence of song. 
They take complete possession of the reader. Shelley's ^(^/(^w^zj-, an 
elegy on John Keats, ranks with the great elegies in the language. 

John Keats (1795-1821), the remaining figure of importance in 
this group of poets, stands in many ways in strong contrast with his 
immediate contemporaries. The spirit of social unrest, the reforms 
that aroused his brother poets, the grave, perplexing questions of 
the day, had no interest for him. He lived in an ideal poetic 
world of his own. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, and the 
mythology of Greece and Rome were far more interesting than any 
dream of universal brotherhood. He loved beauty, and that he 
sought in art and in nature, and that he undertook to incorporate 



THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xxv 

into his verse. As has been suggested, Keats turned to the past for 
his materials and found them in the mythology of Greece and in 
the stories and legends of the Middle Ages. Although he was 
born and brought up in the city, he had a keen appreciation of 
nature and found there forms of beauty that enchanted him. As 
for his place in the romantic movement, he may be said to represent 
the artistic revolt against eighteenth-century ideals. He has ex- 
pressed his ideas on this subject most forcibly in one of his early 
poems, Sleep and Poetry. Shortly before his death he said, ** I 
have loved the principle of beauty in all things." This is the 
principle that he preached and exemplified in his work. 

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty; this is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 

Prose Fiction. — The great outburst of feeling which came at the 
beginning of the century naturally found its best expression in 
verse. The revulsion against the spirit of the previous century, 
which, as we have seen, was an age of prose in both thought and 
expression, led to the placing of prose below poetry, as a literary 
medium; and even the prose of the new period is for the most part 
dominated by the romantic spirit proper to poetry. Many of the 
novels of Scott, produced from 1 8 14 to 1831, are the very breath of 
romance. 

When the enthusiastic readers of The Lay of the Last Minstrel^ 
Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake transferred their enthusiasm 
to their new idol, Byron, Scott turned his attention to a story which 
he had begun several years earlier. This he finished and published 
anonymously under the title of Waver ley. Its success was immediate 
and striking. The result was that Scott devoted himself seriously 
to novel writing, and there followed a series of thrilling stories, the 
production of which is one of the most wonderful literary accom- 
pHshments in history. These stories deal largely with the past. 
Chivalry and the Crusades were topics that appealed strongly to 
Scott's vivid imagination. Some of his novels deal with later 
historical events, either on the Continent or in England and Scot- 
land. Still another group, which may really be called novels, deal 



xxvi THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

with contemporary life, and depict real Scottish manners and cus- 
toms. Such are Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of 
Lammer77ioor, and The Antiquary. Scott is essentially a story 
teller, either in prose or in verse, but in addition to this he is a 
keen observer. Add to this the element of surprise, the love of ex- 
citing adventure, and something of dramatic power, and we have the 
qualities that awakened in his age and still awaken a strong interest 
in the novels of this lively, strong-hearted, sympathetic man. 

The novels of Jane Austen ( 1 775-1817) cannot be called romantic 
in the true sense of the word. They are true portrayals of the 
somewhat commonplace provincial life of her time. They are, 
however, as far removed from the hackneyed conventionalities of 
the eighteenth century as they are from the romanticism of Scott. 
Miss Austen found pleasure in observing the simple happenings of 
everyday life, and described them with minuteness and gentle 
humor. The most widely read of her novels are Sense ajid Sensibil- 
ity and Pride and Prejudice, which appeared in 1811 and 1812. 

The Essay, — The novel was not the only form of prose to feel 
the quickening influence of the new movement. The essay, which 
had suffered a decadence since the days of Addison and Swift, took 
on at this time a new spirit and a new force. Charles Lamb (1775- 
1834), the first of the romantic essayists of this period, was one of 
the most lovable men in literary history. His chief works are the 
Essays of Elia, Specitnens from the Dramatic Poets, the Tales from 
Shakespeare, and several critical essays. 

Lamb was a school-fellow of Coleridge at Christ's Hospital; and 
these two unusual boys found many sources of common interest, 
which made them friends for life. The lives of both men were 
sorrowful; Coleridge's through his own fault, Lamb's because of 
circumstances over which he had no control. His sister Mary, 
during a temporary fit of insanity, killed her mother. To this sister 
Charles devoted his life, tenderly caring for her during the recur- 
rences of her derangement. She was a genial spirit, with tastes not 
unlike those of Lamb himself; and, although life for them was one 
constant labor, it was not without its compensations. They saved 
and shared, took outings, observed, studied, and wrote together. 



THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xxvii 

Lamb delighted in the quaint, the unusual, the old. He loved 
the old authors and the old customs. It pleased him to wander in 
unusual places, to meditate upon buildings dim with the dust of 
agesj to speculate upon their mysterious secrets. He enjoyed col- 
lecting curios, odd prints, old books, and pieces of china. These 
tastes Lamb shows in his choice of subjects and in his method of 
treatment. He is no less romantic in the one than in the other. 
His essays reflect the sweetness and quaintness of his nature, and 
the courage and pathos of his life; and are enriched by a pensive 
and delicate humor that is of the heart. The first of these essays 
he contributed to the London Magazine in August, 1820. From 
that time on an essay appeared each month for more than two years, 
when they were collected and issued in book form under the title 
of Essays of Elia.- The Last Essays of Elia appeared in 1 833, 
about a year before the author's death. 

De Quincey (1785-1859), the next one of importance in this 
group of writers, was ten years younger than Lamb, and fifteen 
years younger than Wordsworth, the object of his youthful adora- 
tion. The fact that he was so strongly attracted by the poetry of 
the new school of poets suggests something of De Quincey's liter- 
ary temperament. He possessed characteristics which made him 
love poets and poetry, and which led him to write his prose at 
times in a style akin to genuine poetry. His imagination was un- 
usually active and happy. He was endowed with the power of 
seeing into the heart of things, of feeling the meaning of things. 
Coupled with this was the power of portraying for his readers in 
vivid and poetic forms whatever he saw or felt or dreamed. Aside 
from the richness of invention, De Quincey shows his poetic feeling 
in his love for mystery and his pathetic brooding over the sorrows 
of human life. The first of these traits led him to love solitude, to 
stand rapt in wonder in the presence of the sublimities of nature, 
— the vastness of mountains or of the heavens, the roll of the 
thunder, the flashing of the lightning, the calmness of moonlit 
skies, the majesty of the ocean; the latter caused him to feel 
sympathy for the outcast, the poor, the wretched. The first filled 
him with a broad feeling ef religious veneration; the latter with a 



xxviii THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

plaintive melancholy. The one caused him to feel the mystery of 
the natural world; the other, the mysteries of human existence. 
As a result of these poetic characteristics De Quincey has left us 
some magnificent examples of highly impassioned prose, often 
styled prose poetry. 

The reasons why De Quincey was not actually a poet are not far 
to seek. As a matter of fact he tried to write poetry early in his 
career, but found the restraint of versification uncongenial. His 
attention was more concerned with the substance than the form. 
Furthermore, in spite of a far-seeing and richly inventive imagina- 
tion, his mind was naturally analytic. He loved to work out laby- 
rinthine details, to trace a result back to its most remote causes, 
to follow out the most minute effects of a trivial circumstance. It 
made no difference whether he was solving a problem in political 
economy, searching the depths of human emotion, pointing out the 
significance of some historical event, or picking flaws in some one 
else's reasoning. 

The breadth of his knowledge is a striking characteristic of De 
Quincey. In his choice of subjects he was restricted by no bounds. 
He possessed a universal curiosity, and wrote upon remote and 
obscure phases of history with as much confidence as he related 
his personal experience in Wales and in London. Philosophy, 
history, biography, science, theology, politics, literary criticism, 
fiction, — all served as fields, or perhaps we may with greater 
propriety say excursions, for his intellectual labors. 

De Quincey's style partakes of the characteristics of the man 
himself. Besides the charm of poetic feeling and vivid imagina- 
tiveness, there is a warmth, a richness, and an eloquence to his 
diction that is rarely equalled. His style is sometimes stately, 
sometimes vivacious; it has beauty, and rhythm, and elegance. 

Its chief drawback is discursiveness. The long digressions that 
take us away from the main thread, just at the moment of intense 
interest, often have the effect on our feelings that is produced by 
the untimely close of a chapter in a serial story. These digressions 
are generally the result of the author's desire to place before us all 
the circumstances before he presents the case itself. He leads the 



THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL xxix 

reader along one train of thought almost to the significant point 
and then returns to bring him up to the same place by another 
way. This, together with his love of minute details, has caused 
De Quincey to be called loquacious. His life was, as he himself 
often said, an intellectual one; he lived mostly with his books, his 
dreams, and his theories; and about these, which were a part of 
himself, he liked to talk. 

Like Lamb, De Quincey sees the humorous side of things as well 
as the serious; but, unlike Lamb, he often allows his humor to 
become extravagant and sometimes spiteful. He is never so seri- 
ous that he passes over an opportunity for a little fun, never so 
interested in a discussion that he cannot pause to play a joke on 
an imagined opponent. The most extravagant outbursts of humor 
are to be found in Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. 
In his controversial writings De Quincey's humor sometimes is 
of such a mischievous character that it is difficult to distinguish it 
from malevolence; yet it is hardly that. It is rather a delight in 
turning the tables on an opponent and then enjoying, in a good- 
natured way, the latter's discomfiture. This, it must be remem- 
bered, too, was an intellectual, not an actual, delight. De Quincey 
as a man evidently revelled in this sort of inner merriment. Closely 
associated with this humor is a pathos, which is just as deep and 
affecting and no less a part of the man and the writer. 

The Reviews. — English prose received something of an impetus 
through the establishment, in the early part of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, of the great critical reviews. The Edinburgh Review was 
founded in 1802 by several prominent young Liberals; The 
Quarterly, a Tory organ, followed in 1808; and Blackwood's in 
1817. All of these were Scottish. The first English review of 
importance was the Westmitister, not established till 1824. Al- 
though these periodicals were founded chiefly for political pur- 
poses, they exercised a considerable influence over literature. It 
was an influence, however, largely antagonistic to the literary 
movement of the time. They stood as the last bulwarks of the 
old poetic ideas and theories. The criticism was autocratic and 
personal. Instead of making a careful examination and evalua- 



XXX THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

tion of the books reviewed, the writers either praised or con- 
demned unsparingly; and, not content with the harsh assertions 
about works that were not to their taste, they heaped abuse 
upon the authors. Their bitterest attacks were upon the poets. 
Scarcely one of prominence escaped from Wordsworth to Tenny- 
son. Coleridge says, in the Biographia Liieraria^ that he con- 
siders a large share of his popularity due to the attacks made upon 
him by the reviewers. Byron characterized a similar attack of the 
reviewers upon himself as " a masterpiece of low wit, a tissue of 
scurrilous abuse," and in response wrote his satirical poem, Eng* 
lish Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Shelley, in his Adonais, lashes 
the reviewers for their harshness to John Keats. 

The best critical writings that appeared in the reviews dealt with 
the old authors. It was through the channels of these periodicals 
that the best of the critical works of Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, 
Carlyle, and Macaulay found their way to the public. 



JOAN OF ARC 



JOAN OF ARC^ 

1. What is to be thought of her? What is to be 
thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and 
forests of Lorraine, that — Hke the Hebrew shepherd 
boy ° from the hills and forests of Judea — rose suddenly 
out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious 
inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral soUtudes, to a station 
in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station at 
the right hand of kings ? The Hebrew boy inaugurated 
his patriotic mission by an act, by a victorious act, such 
as no man could deny. But so did the girl of Lorraine, 

i"y4rc" .• — Modern France, that should know a great deal better 
than myself, insists that the name is not D'Arc — «>., of Arc — but 
Dare. Now it happens sometimes that, if a person whose position 
guarantees his access to the best information will content himself with 
gloomy dogmatism, striking the table with his fist, and saying in a 
terrific voice, " It is so, and there's an end of it," one bows deferentially, 
and submits. But, if, unhappily for himself, won by this docility, he 
relents too amiably into reasons and arguments, probably one raises an 
insurrection against him that may never be crushed ; for in the fields of 
logic one can skirmish, perhaps, as well as he. Had he confined him- 
self to dogmatism, he would have intrenched his position in darkness, 
and have hidden his own vulnerable points. But coming down to base 
reasons he lets in light, and one sees where to plant the blows. Now, 
the worshipful reason of modern France for disturbing the old, 
received spelling is that Jean Hordal, a descendant of La Pucelle's 
brother, spelled the name Dare in 1612. But what of that ? It is noto- 
rious that what small matter of spelling Providence had thought fit to 
disburse amongst man in the seventeenth century was all monopolised 
by printers ; now, M. Hordal was not a printer. 

3 



4 THOMAS DE OUINCEY 

if we read her story as it was read by those who saw her 
nearest. Adverse armies bore witness to the boy as no 
pretender ; but so they did to the gentle girl. Judged 
by the voices of all who saw them/r^/;z a station of good 
will, both were found true and loyal to any promises 
involved in their first acts. Enemies it was that made 
the difference between their subsequent fortunes. The 
boy rose to a splendour and a noonday prosperity, both 
personal and pubHc, that rang through the records of his 
people, and became a byword among his posterity for a 
thousand years, until the sceptre was departing from 
Judah. The poor, forsaken girl, on the contrary, drank 
not herself from that cup of rest which she had secured 
for France. She never sang together with the songs that 
rose in her native Domremy as echoes to the departing 
steps of invaders. She mingled not in the festal dances 
of Vaucouleurs° which celebrated in rapture the redemp- 
tion of France. No ! for her voice was then silent ; no ! 
for her feet were dust. Pure, innocent, noble-hearted 
girl ! whom, from earliest youth, ever I beheved in as 
full of truth and self-sacrifice, this was amongst the 
strongest pledges for thy truth, that never once — no, not 
for a moment of weakness — didst thou revel in the vision 
of coronets and honour from man. Coronets for thee ! 
Oh, no ! Honours, if they come when all is over, are 
for those that share thy blood.^ Daughter of Domremy, 
when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be 
sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her. King of France, 
but she will not hear thee. Cite her by the apparitors ° 

1 " Those that share thy blood" : — A collateral relative of Joanna's 
was subsequently ennobled by the title of Du Lys, 




FROM THE STATUE BY CHAPU 

JOAN OF ARC AT DO MR KM V 



JOAN OF ARC 5 

to come and receive a robe of honour, but she will be 
found en contumace^ When the thunders of universal 
France, as even yet may happen,° shall proclaim the 
grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave up all for 
her country, thy ear, young shepherd girl, will have been 
deaf for five centuries. To suffer and to do, that was thy 
portion in this life ; that was thy destiny ; and not for a 
moment was it hidden from thyself. Life, thou saidst, is 
short ; and the sleep which is in the grave is long ; let 
me use that life, so transitory, for the glory of those 
heavenly dreams destined to comfort the sleep which is 
so long ! This pure creature — pure from every suspicion 
of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure in 
senses more obvious — never once did this holy child, as 
regarded herself, relax from her belief in the darkness 
that was traveUing to meet her. She might not prefigure 
the very manner of her death ; she saw not in vision, 
perhaps, the aerial altitude of the fiery scaffold, the spec- 
tators without end, on every road, pouring into Rouen as 
to a coronation, the surging smoke, the volleying flames, 
the hostile faces all around, the pitying eye that lurked 
but here and there, until nature and imperishable truth 
broke loose from artificial restraints — these might not be 
apparent through the mists of the hurrying future. But 
the voice that called her to death, that she heard for 
ever. 

2. Great was the throne of France ° even in those days, 
and great was he that sat upon it ; but well Joanna knew 
that not the throne, nor he that sat upon it, was for her ; 
but, on the contrary, that she was for them ; not she by 
them, but they by her, should rise from the dust. Gor- 



6 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

geous were the lilies of France," and for centuries had the 
privilege to spread their beauty over land and sea, until, 
in another century, the wrath of God and man combined 
to wither them ; ° but well Joanna knew, early at 
Domremy she had read that bitter truth, that the lilies 
of France would decorate no garland for /ler. Flower 
nor bud, bell nor blossom, would ever bloom for 

3. But stay. What reason is there taking up this sub- 
ject of Joanna precisely in the spring of 1847? Might 
it not have been left till the spring of 1947, or, perhaps, 
left till called for? Yes, but it is called for, and clamor- 
ously. You are aware, reader, that amongst the many 
original thinkers whom modern France has produced, 
one of the reputed leaders is M. Michelet.^ All these 
writers are of a revolutionary cast ; ° not in a pohtical 
sense merely, but in all senses ; mad, oftentimes, as 
March hares ; crazy with the laughing gas of recovered 
liberty ; ° drunk with the wine cup of their mighty Revo- 
lution, snorting, whinnying, throwing up their heels, hke 
wild horses in the boundless pampas, and running races 
of defiance with snipes, or with the winds, or with their 
own shadows, if they can find nothing else to challenge. 
Some time or other, I, that have leisure to read, may in- 
troduce you, that have not, to two or three dozen of these 
writers ; of whom I can assure you beforehand that they 
are often profound, and at intervals are even as impas- 
sioned as if they were come of our best English blood. 
But now, confining our attention to M. Michelet, we in 
England — who know him best by his worst book, the 
book against priests,° etc. — know him disadvantageously. 



JOAN OF ARC 7 

That book is a rhapsody of incoherence. But his 
" History of France " is quite another thing, A man, 
in whatsoever craft he sails, cannot stretch away out of 
sight when he is Hnked to the windings of the shore by 
towing-ropes of History. Facts, and the consequences 
of facts, draw the writer back to the falconer's lure from 
the giddiest heights of speculation. Here, therefore — 
in his " France " — if not always free from flightiness, if 
now and then off like a rocket for an airy wheel in the 
clouds, M. Michelet, with natural politeness, never forgets 
that he has left a large audience waiting for him on earth, 
and gazing upward in anxiety for his return; return, 
therefore, he does. But History, though clear of certain 
temptations in one direction, has separate dangers of its 
own. It is impossible so to write a history of France, or 
of England — works becoming every hour more indis- 
pensable to the inevitably poHtical man of this day — 
without perilous openings for error. If I, for instance, 
on the part of England, should happen to turn my la- 
bours into that channel, and (on the model of Lord Percy 
going to Chevy Chase °) 

" A vow to God should make 

My pleasure in the Michelet woods 
Three summer days to take," 

probably, from simple delirium, I might hunt M. Michelet 
into delirium tremens. Two strong angels stand by the 
side of History, whether French history or English, as 
heraldic supporters : the angel of research on the left 
hand, that must read milhons of dusty parchments, and 
of pages blotted with Ues ; the angel of meditation on 



8 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

the right hand, that must cleanse these lying records with 
fire, even as of old the draperies of asbestos were 
cleansed,° and must quicken them into regenerated life. 
Willingly I acknowledge that no man will ever avoid in- 
numerable errors of detail; with so vast a compass of 
ground to traverse, this is impossible ; but such errors 
(though I have a bushel on hand, at M. Michelet's ser- 
vice) are not the game I chase ; it is the bitter and un- 
fair spirit in which M. Michelet writes against England. 
Even that, after all, is but my secondary object; the real 
one is Joanna, the Pucelle d 'Orleans herself. 

4. I am not going to write the history of La Pucelle : ° to 
do this, or even circumstantially to report the history of 
her persecution and bitter death, of her struggle with 
false witnesses and with ensnaring judges, it would be 
necessary to have before us all the documents," and there- 
fore the collection ° only now forthcoming in Paris.^ But 
my purpose is narrower. There have been great thinkers, 
disdaining the careless judgments of contemporaries, who 
have thrown themselves boldly on the judgment of a far 
posterity, that should have had time to review, to ponder, 
to compare. There have been great actors on the stage 
of tragic humanity that might, with the same depth of 
confidence, have appealed from the levity of compatriot 
friends — too heartless for the subUme interest of their 
story, and too impatient for the labour of sifting its per- 
plexities — to the magnanimity and justice of enemies. 
To this class belongs the Maid of Arc. The ancient 

1" Only now forthcoming" : — In 1847 began the publication (from 
official records) of Joanna's trial. It was interrupted, I fear, by the con- 
vulsions of 1848 ; and whether even yet finished I do not know. 



JOAN OF ARC 9 

Romans were too faithful to the ideal of grandeur in 
themselves not to relent, after a generation or two, before 
the grandeur of Hannibal.° Mithridates,° a more doubt- 
ful person, yet, merely for the magic perseverance of his 
indomitable malice, won from the same Romans the only 
real honour that ever he received on earth. And we 
Enghsh have ever shown the same homage to stubborn 
enmity. To work unflinchingly for the ruin of England ; 
to say through life, by word and by deed, Delenda est 
Anglia Victrix!° — that one purpose of malice, faithfully 
pursued, has quartered some people upon our national 
funds of homage as by a perpetual annuity. Better than 
an inheritance of service rendered to England herself has 
sometimes proved the most insane hatred to England. 
Hyder Ali,° even his son Tippoo, though so far inferior, 
and Napoleon, have all benefited by this disposition 
among ourselves to exaggerate the merit of diabolic 
enmity. Not one of these men was ever capable, in a 
solitary instance, of praising an enemy (what do you say 
to that, reader ?) ; and yet in their behalf, we consent to 
forget, not their crimes only, but (which is worse) their 
hideous bigotry and anti-magnanimous egotism — for 
nationality it was not. Suffren,° and some half dozen of 
other French nautical heroes, because rightly they did 
us all the mischief they could (which was really great), 
are names justly reverenced in England. On the same 
principle, La Pucelle d'Orl^ans, the victorious enemy of 
England, has been destined to receive her deepest com- 
memoration from the magnanimous justice of Englishmen. 
5. Joanna, as we in England should call her, but ac- 
cording to her own statement, Jeanne (or, as M. Michelet 



10 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

asserts, Jean ^) D'Arc was born at Domr^my, a village on 
the marches of Lorraine and Champagne, and dependent 
upon the town of Vaucouleurs. I have called her a Lor- 
rainer, not simply because the word is prettier, but be- 
cause Champagne too odiously reminds us English of 
what are for us imaginary wines — which, undoubtedly, 
La Pucelle tasted as rarely as we English : we English, 
because the champagne of London is chiefly grown in 
Devonshire ; La Pucelle, because the champagne of 
Champagne never, by any chance, flowed into the foun- 
tain of Domr^my, from which only she drank. M. 
Michelet will have her to be a Champenoise° and for no 
better reason than that she "took after her father," who 
happened to be a Champenois. 

6. These disputes, however, turn on refinements too 
nice. Domr^my stood upon the frontiers, and, like 
other frontiers, produced a mixed race, representing the 
cis and the trans.'' A river (it is true) formed the 
boundary line at this point — the river Meuse ; and thaty 

1 "Jean" : — M. Michelet asserts that there was a mystical meaning 
at that era in calling a child Jean; it implied a secret commendation of 
a child, if not a dedication, to St. John the evangelist, the beloved dis- 
ciple, the apostle of love and mysterious visions. But, really, as the 
name was so exceedingly common, few people will detect a mystery in 
calling a day by the name of Jack, though it does seem mysterious to 
call a girl Jack. It may be less so in France, where a beautiful practice 
has always prevailed of giving a boy his mother's name — preceded and 
strengthened by a male name, as Charles Anne, Victor Victoire. In 
cases where a mother's memory has been unusually dear to a son, this 
vocal memento of her, locked into the circle of his own name, gives to it 
the tenderness of a testamentary relic, or a funeral ring. I presume, 
therefore, that La Pucelle must have borne the baptismal name of 
Jeanne Jean ; the latter with no reference, perhaps, to so sublime a per- 
son as St. John, but simply to some relative. 



JOAN OF ARC II 

in old days, might have divided the populations ; but in 
these days it did not; there were bridges, there were 
ferries, and weddings crossed from the right bank to the 
left. Here lay two great roads, not so much for travellers 
that were few, as for armies that were too many by half. 
These two roads, one of which was the great highroad 
between France and Germany, decussated^ at this very 
point ; which is a learned way of saying that they formed 
a St. Andrew's Cross, or letter X. I hope the compositor 
will choose a good large X ; in which case the point of 
intersection, the locus of conflux and intersection for 
these four diverging arms, will finish the reader's geo- 
graphical education, by showing him to a hair's-breadth 
where it was that Domr^my stood. These roads, so 
grandly situated, as great trunk arteries between two 
mighty realms,^ and haunted for ever by wars or rumours 
of wars, decussated (for anything I know to the contrary) 
absolutely under Joanna's bedroom window ; one rolling 
away to the right, past M. D'Arc's old barn, and the other 
unaccountably preferring to sweep round that odious 
man's ° pig-sty to the left. 

7. On whichever side of the border chance had thrown 
Joanna, the same love to France would have been nurtured. 
For it is a strange fact, noticed by M. Michelet and others, 
that the Dukes of Bar and Lorraine had for generations 
pursued the policy of eternal warfare with PVance on their 
own account, yet also of eternal amity and league with 
France in case anybody else presumed to attack her. 

1 And reminding one of that description, so justly admired by Paul 
Richter, which a Russian Czarina placed on a guide-post near Moscow. 
This is the road that leads to Constantinople. 



12 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

Let peace settle upon France, and before long you might 
rely upon seeing the little vixen Lorraine flying at the 
throat of France. Let France be assailed by a formidable 
enemy, and instantly you saw a Duke of Lorraine insist- 
ing on having his own throat cut in support of France ; 
which favour accordingly was cheerfully granted to him 
in three great successive battles : twice by the English, 
viz., at Cr^cy° and Agincourt,° once by the Sultan at 
Nicopolis.° 

8. This sympathy with France during great eclipses, in 
those that during ordinary seasons were always teasing 
her with brawls and guerilla inroads, strengthened the 
natural piety to France of those that were confessedly the 
children of her own house. The outposts of France, as 
one may call the great frontier provinces, were of all 
locahties the most devoted to the Fleurs de Lys. To 
witness, at any great crisis, the generous devotion to these 
lilies of the little fiery cousin that in gentler weather was 
for ever tilting at the breast of France, could not but fan 
the zeal of France's legitimate daughters ; while to occupy 
a post of honour on the frontiers against an old hereditary 
enemy of France would naturally stimulate this zeal by a 
sentiment of martial pride, by a sense of danger always 
threatening, and of hatred always smouldering. That 
great four-headed road was a perpetual memento to 
patriotic ardour. To say " This way lies the road to 
Paris, and that other way to Aix-la-Chapelle ; this to 
Prague, that to Vienna," nourished the warfare of the 
heart by daily ministrations of sense. The eye that 
watched for the gleams of lance or helmet from the hostile 
frontier, the ear that listened for the groaning of wheels, 



JOAN OF ARC 13 

made the highroad itself, with its relations to centres so 
remote, into a manual of patriotic duty. 

9. The situaftion, therefore, locally, of Joanna was full 
of profound suggestions to a heart that listened for the 
stealthy steps of change and fear that too surely were 
in motion. But, if the place were grand, the time, the 
burden of the time, was far more so. The air overhead 
in its upper chambers was hm-tling with the obscure 
sound ; was dark with sullen fermenting of storms that had 
been gathering for a hundred and thirty years. The 
battle of Agincourt in Joanna's childhood had reopened 
the wounds of France. Cr^cy and Poictiers,° those 
withering overthrows ° for the chivalry of France, had, 
before Agincourt occurred, been tranquihsed by more than 
half a century; but this resurrection of their trumpet 
wails made the whole series of battles and endless skir- 
mishes take their stations as parts in one drama. The 
graves that had closed sixty years ago seemed to fly open 
in sympathy with a sorrow that echoed their own. The 
monarchy of France laboured in extremity, rocked and 
reeled like a ship fighting with the darkness of monsoons. 
The madness of the poor king° (Charles VL), falling in at 
such a crisis, Hke the case of women labouring in child- 
birth during the storming of a city, trebled the awfulness 
of the time. Even the wild story of the incident which 
had immediately occasioned the explosion of this madness 
— the case of a man unknown, gloomy, and perhaps 
maniacal himself, coming out of a forest at noonday, 
laying his hand upon the bridle of the king's horse, check- 
ing him for a moment to say, " Oh, king, thou art 
betrayed," and then vanishing, no man knew whither, as 



14 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

he had appeared for no man knew what — fell in with the 
universal prostration of mind that laid France on her 
knees, as before the slow unweaving of some ancient 
prophetic doom. The famines, the extraordinary diseases,° 
the insurrections of the peasantry up and down Europe — 
these were chords struck from the same mysterious harp ; 
but these were transitory chords. There had been others 
of deeper and more ominous sound. The termination of 
the Crusades,° the destruction of the Templars,° the Papal 
interdicts,^ the tragedies caused or suffered by the house 
of Anjou,° and by the Emperor ° — these were full of a 
more permanent significance. But, since then, the 
colossal figure of feudalism was seen standing, as it were 
on tiptoe, at Crecy, for flight from earth : that was a revo- 
lution unparalleled ; yet //taf was a trifle by comparison 
with the more fearful revolutions that were mining below 
the Church. By her own internal schisms, by the abomi- 
nable spectacle of a double Pope° — so that no man, 
except through political bias, could even guess which was 
Heaven's vicegerent, and which the creature of Hell — 
the Church was rehearsing, as in still earlier forms she had 
already rehearsed, those vast rents ° in her foundations 
which no man should ever heal. 

10. These were the loftiest peaks of the cloudland in 
the skies that to the scientific gazer first caught the colours 
of the new morning in advance. But the whole vast 
range ahke of sweeping glooms overhead dwelt upon all 
meditative minds, even upon those that could not dis- 
tinguish the tendencies nor decipher the forms. It was 
therefore, not her own age alone, as affected by its 
immediate calamities, that lay with such weight upon 



JOAN OF ARC 15 

Joanna's mind, but her own age as one section in a vast 
mysterious drama, unweaving through a century back, and 
drawing nearer continually to some dreadful crisis. Cat- 
aracts and rapids were heard roaring ahead ; and signs 
were seen far back, by help of old men's memories, which 
answered secretly to signs now coming forward on the 
eye, even as locks answer to keys. It was not wonderful 
that in such a haunted soUtude, with such a haunted 
heart, Joanna should see angelic visions, and hear angelic 
voices. These voices whispered to her for ever the duty 
self-imposed of delivering France. Five years she 
hstened to these monitory voices with internal struggles. 
At length she could resist no longer. Doubt gave way ; 
and she left her home for ever in order to present herself 
at the dauphin's court. 

11. The education of this poor girl was mean according 
to the present standard : was ineffably grand, according 
to a purer philosophic standard : and only not good for 
our age because for us it would be unattainable. She 
read nothing, for she could not read ; but she had heard 
others read parts of the Roman martyrology. She wept 
in sympathy with the sad " Misereres " ° of the Romish 
Church; she rose to heaven with the glad triumphant " Te 
Deums"° of Rome ; she drew her comfort and her vital 
strength from the rites of the same Church. But, next 
after these spiritual advantages, she owed most to the 
advantages of her situation. The fountain of Domr^my 
was on the brink of a boundless forest ; and it was haunted 
to that degree by fairies that the parish priest (^ure) was 
obliged to read mass there once a year, in order to keep 
them in any decent bounds. Fairies are important, jsven 



l6 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

in a statistical view : certain weeds mark poverty in the 
soil, fairies mark its solitude. As surely as the wolf re- 
tires before cities does the fairy sequester herself from 
the haunts of the licensed victualer. A village is too 
much for her nervous dehcacy ; at most, she can tolerate 
a distant view of a hamlet. We may judge, therefore, 
by the uneasiness and extra trouble which they gave to 
the parson, in what strength the fairies mustered at Dom- 
r^my, and, by a satisfactory consequence, how thinly sown 
with men and women must have been that region even in 
its inhabited spots. But the forests of Domr^my — those 
were the glories of the land : for in them abode myste- 
rious powers and ancient secrets that towered into tragic 
strength. " Abbeys there were, and abbey windows " — 
"like Moorish temples of the Hindoos " — that exercised 
even princely power both in Lorraine and in the German 
Diets. These had their sweet bells that pierced the for- 
ests for many a league at matins or vespers, and each its 
own dreamy legend. Few enough, and scattered enough, 
were these abbeys, so as in no degree to disturb the deep 
sohtude of the region ; yet many enough to spread a net- 
work or awning of Christian sanctity over what else might 
have seemed a heathen wilderness. This sort of rehgious 
talisman being secured, a man the most afraid of ghosts 
(like myself, suppose, or the reader) becomes armed into 
courage to wander for days in their sylvan recesses. The 
mountains of the Vosges, on the eastern frontier of France, 
have never attracted much notice from Europe, except in 
1 813-14 for a few brief months, when they fell within 
Napoleon's line of defence against the Allies. But they 
are interesting for this among other features, that they do 



JOAN OF ARC 17 

not, like some loftier ranges, repel woods ; the forests and 
the hills are on sociable terms. " Live and let live " is 
their motto. For this reason, in part, these tracts in 
Lorraine were a favourite hunting-ground with the Car- 
lovingian princes. About six hundred years before 
Joanna's childhood, Charlemagne was known to have 
hunted there. That, of itself, was a grand incident in 
the traditions of a forest or a chase. In these vast for- 
ests, also, were to be found (if anywhere to be found) 
those mysterious fawns ° that tempted solitary hunters 
into visionary and perilous pursuits. Here was seen (if 
anywhere seen) that ancient stag ° who was already nine 
hundred years old, but possibly a hundred or two more, 
when met by Charlemagne ; and the thing was put be- 
yond doubt by the inscription upon his golden collar. I 
beheve Charlemagne knighted the stag; and, if ever he 
is met again by a king, he ought to be made an earl, or, 
being upon the marches of France, a marquis. Observe, 
I don't absolutely vouch for all these things : my own 
opinion varies. On a fine breezy forenoon I am auda- 
ciously sceptical ; but as twihght sets in my credulity grows 
steadily, till it becomes equal to anything that could be 
desired. And I have heard candid sportsmen declare 
that, outside of these very forests, they laughed loudly at all 
the dim tales connected with their haunted solitudes, but, 
on reaching a spot notoriously eighteen miles deep within 
them, they agreed with Sir Roger de Coverley that a 
good deal might be said on both sides. 

12. Such traditions, or any others that (like the stag) 
connect distant generations with each other, are, for that 
cause, subHme ; and the sense of the shadowy, connected 



1 8 • THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

with such appearances that reveal themselves or not ac- 
cording to circumstances, leaves a colouring of sanctity 
over ancient forests, even in those minds that utterly 
reject the legend as a fact. 

13. But, apart from all distinct stories of that order, in 
any solitary frontier between two great empires — as 
here, for instance, or in the desert between Syria and the 
Euphrates — there is an inevitable tendency, in minds 
of any deep sensibility, to people the solitudes with 
phantom images of powers that were of old so vast. 
Joanna, therefore, in her quiet occupation of a shepherd- 
ess, would be led continually to brood over the political 
condition of her country by the traditions of the past no 
less than by the mementoes of the local present. 

14. Michelet, indeed, says that La Pucelle was not a 
shepherdess. I beg his pardon; she was. What he 
rests upon I guess pretty well : it is the evidence of a 
woman called Haumette, the most confidential friend of 
Joanna. Now, she is a good witness, and a good girl, 
and I like her ; for she makes a natural and affectionate 
report of Joanna's ordinary life. But still, however good 
she may be as a witness, Joanna is better ; and she, when 
speaking to the dauphin, calls herself in the Latin re- 
port Bergereta° Even Haumette confesses that Joanna 
tended sheep in her girlhood. And I believe that, if Miss 
Haumette were taking coffee along with me this very 
evening (February 12, 1847) — ,in which there would be 
no subject for scandal or for maiden blushes, because 1 
am an intense philosopher, and Miss H. would be hard 
upon 450 years old — she would admit the following 
comment upon her evidence to be right. A Frenchman, 



JOAN OF ARC 19 

about forty years ago — M. Simond, in his " Travels " — 
mentions accidentally the following hideous scene as one 
steadily observed and watched by himself in chivalrous 
France not very long before the French Revolution : A 
peasant was ploughing ; and the team that drew his plough 
was a donkey and a woman. Both were regularly har- 
nessed ; both pulled alike. This is bad enough ; but the 
Frenchman adds that, in distributing his lashes, the peas- 
ant was obviously desirous of being impartial ; or, if either 
of the yokefellows had a right to complain, certainly it was 
not the donkey. Now, in any country where such deg- 
radation of females could be tolerated by the state of 
manners, a woman of dehcacy would shrink from ac- 
knowledging, either for herself or her friend, that she had 
ever been addicted to any mode of labour not strictly 
domestic ; because, if once owning herself a prsedial ser- 
vant, she would be sensible that this confession extended 
by probability in the hearer's thoughts to the having in- 
curred indignities of this horrible kind. Haumette clearly 
thinks it more dignified for Joanna to have been darning 
the stockings of her horny-hoofed father, M. D'Arc, than 
keeping sheep, lest she might then be suspected of having 
ever done something worse. But, luckily, there was no 
danger oithat: Joanna never was in service ; and my opin- 
ion is that her father should have mended his own stock- 
ings, since probably he was the party to make the holes in 
them, as many a better man than D'Arc does — meaning 
by that not myself, because, though probably a better man 
than D'Arc, I protest against doing anything of the kind. 
If I lived even with Friday in Juan Fernandez, either 
Friday must do all the darning, or else it must go undone. 



20 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

The better men that I meant were the sailors in the British 
navy, every man of whom mends his own stockings. 
Who else is to do it ? Do you suppose, reader, that the 
junior lords of the admiralty are under articles to darn 
for the navy? 

15. The reason, meantime, for my systematic hatred 
of ^' Arc is this : There was a story current in France 
before the Revolution, framed to ridicule the pauper 
aristocracy, who happened to have long pedigrees and 
short rent rolls : viz., that a head of such a house, dating 
from the Crusades, was overheard saying to his son, a 
ChevaHer of St. Louis, " Chevalier^ as-tu donne au cochofi 
a manger ? " ° Now, it is clearly made out by the surviving 
evidence that D'Arc would much have preferred continu- 
ing to say, " Mafille, as-tu donne au cochon a manger?'^ 
to saying, " Fucelle d' Orleans, as-tu sauve les fleurs-de- 
lys?^' There is an old Enghsh copy of verses which 
argues thus : 

** If the man that turnips cries 
Cry not when his father dies, 
Then 'tis plain the man had rather 
Have a turnip than his father." 

I cannot say that the logic of these verses was ever entirely 
to my satisfaction. I do not see my way through it as 
clearly as could be wished. But I see my way most clearly 
through D'Arc ; and the result is — that he would greatly 
have preferred not merely a turnip to his father, but the 
saving a pound or so of bacon to saving the Oriflamme 
of France. 

16. It is probable (as M. Michelet suggests) that the 
title of Virgin or Pucelle had in itself, and apart from the 



JOAN OF ARC 21 

miraculous stories about her, a secret power over the rude 
soldiery and partisan chiefs of that period ; for in such 
a person they saw a representative manifestation of the 
Virgin Mary, who, in a course of centuries, had grown 
steadily upon the popular heart. 

17. As to Joanna's supernatural detection of the 
dauphin° (Charles VII.) among three hundred lords and 
knights, I am surprised at the credulity which could ever 
lend itself to that theatrical juggle. Who admires more 
than myself the subhme enthusiasm, the rapturous faith in 
herself, of this pure creature? But I am far from admir- 
ing stage artifices which not La Pucelle, but the court, 
must have arranged ; nor can surrender myself to the con- 
jurer's legerdemain, such as may be seen every day for a 
shilling. Southey's " Joan of Arc " was published in 1 796. 
Twenty years after, talking with Southey, I was surprised 
to find him still owning a secret bias in favour of Joan, 
founded on her detection of the dauphin. The story, for the 
benefit of the reader new to the case, was this : La Pucelle 
was first made known to the dauphin, and presented to 
his court, at Chinon ; and here came her first trial. By 
way of testing her supernatural pretensions, she was to find 
out the royal personage amongst the whole ark of clean 
and unclean creatures. Faihng in this coup d'essai,"" she 
would not simply disappoint many a beating heart in the 
glittering crowd that on different motives yearned for her 
success, but she would ruin herself, and, as the oracle 
within had told her, would, by ruining herself, ruin France. 
Our own Sovereign Lady Victoria rehearses annually a 
trial not so severe in degree, but the same in kind. She 
"pricks "° for sheriffs. Joanna pricked for a king. But 



22 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

observe the difference : our own Lady pricks for two men 
out of three ; Joanna for one man out of three hundred. 
Happy Lady of the Islands and the Orient ! — she can go 
astray in her choice only by one-half: to the extent of one- 
half she must have the satisfaction of being right. And 
yet, even with these tight limits to the misery of a bound- 
less discretion, permit me, Liege Lady, with all loyalty, 
to submit that now and then you prick with your pin the 
wrong man. But the poor child from Domremy, shrink- 
ing under the gaze of a dazzling court — not because daz- 
zling (for in visions she had seen those that were more 
so), but because some of them wore a scoffing smile on 
their features — how should she throw her hne into so 
deep a river to angle for a king, where many a gay creature 
was sporting that masqueraded as kings in dress ! Nay, 
even more than any true king would have done : for, in 
Southey's version of the story, the dauphin says, by way 
of trying the virgin's magnetic sympathy with royalty, 

" On the throne, 
I the while mingling with the menial throng, 
Some courtier shall be seated." 

This usurper is even crowned ; " the jeweled crown 
shines on a menial's head." But, really, that is " un peu 
fort^^ ° ; and the mob of spectators might raise a scruple 
whether our friend the jackdaw upon the throne, and the 
dauphin himself, were not grazing the shins of treason. 
For the dauphin could not lend more than belonged to 
him. According to the popular notion, he had no crown 
for himself; consequently none to lend, on any pretence 
whatever, until the consecrated Maid should take him to 



JOAN OF ARC 23 

Rheims. This was the popular notion in France. But 
certainly it was the dauphin's interest to support the 
popular notion, as he meant to use the services of Joanna. 
For if he were king already, what was it that she could do 
for him beyond Orleans ? That is to say, what more than 
a merely military service could she render him? And, 
above all, if he were king without a coronation, and with- 
out the oil from the sacred ampulla, what advantage was 
yet open to him by celerity above his competitor, the 
English boy?° Now was to be a race for a coronation : 
he that should win that race carried the superstition of 
France along with him : he that should first be drawn 
from the ovens of Rheims ° was under that superstition 
baked into a king. 

18. La Pucelle, before she could be allowed to practise 
as a warrior, was put through her manual and platoon 
exercise, as a pupil in divinity, at the bar of six eminent 
men in wigs. According to Southey (v. 393, bk. iii., in 
the original edition of his "Joan of Arc,") she "appalled 
the doctors." It's not easy to do that: but they had 
some reason to feel bothered, as that surgeon would 
assuredly feel bothered who, upon proceeding to dissect 
a subject, should find the subject retaliating as a dissector 
upon himself, especially if Joanna ever made the speech 
to them which occupies v. 354-391, bk. iii. It is a 
double impossibility; ist, because a piracy from Tindal's 
" Christianity as old as the Creation " — a piracy a parte 
aiite° and by three centuries ; 2d, it is quite contrary to 
the evidence on Joanna's trial. Southey's "Joan" of 
A.D. 1796 (Cottle, Bristol) tells the doctors, among other 
secrets, that she never in her fife attended — ist. Mass; 



24 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

nor 2d, the Sacramental Table ; nor 3d, Confession. In 
the meantime, all this deistical confession of Joanna's, 
besides being suicidal for the interest of her cause, is 
opposed to the depositions upon both trials. ° The very 
best witness called from first to last deposes that Joanna 
attended these rites of her Church even too often ; was 
taxed with doing so : and by blushing, owned the charge 
as a fact, though certainly not as a fault. Joanna was a 
girl of natural piety, that saw God in forests and hills and 
fountains, but did not the less seek him in chapels and 
consecrated oratories. 

19. This peasant girl was self-educated through her 
own natural meditativeness. If the reader turns to that 
divine passage in " Paradise Regained " which Milton has 
put into the mouth of our Saviour when first entering the 
wilderness, and musing upon the tendency of those great 
impulses growing within himself — 

" Oh, what a multitude of thoughts at once 
Awakened in me swarm, while I consider 
"What from within I feel myself, and hear 
What from without comes often to my ears, 
111 sorting with my present state compared ! 
When I was yet a child, no childish play 
To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set 
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do, 
W^hat might be public good ; myself I thought 
Born to that end — " 

he will have some notion of the vast reveries which 
brooded over the heart of Joanna in early girlhood, when 
the wings were budding that should carry her from Orleans 
to Rheims ; when the golden chariot was dimly revealing 



JOAN OF ARC 25 

itself that should carry her from the kingdom oi France 
Delivered \.o the Eternal Kingdom. 

20. It is not requisite for the honour of Joanna, nor is 
there in this place room, to pursue her brief career of 
action. That, though wonderful, forms the earthly part of 
her story ; the spiritual part is the saintly passion of her 
imprisonment, trial, and execution. It is unfortunate, 
therefore, for Southey's "Joan of Arc" (which, however, 
should always be regarded as z. juvenile effort), that 
precisely when her real glory begins the poem ends. But 
this limitation of the interest grew, no doubt, from the 
constraint inseparably attached to the law of epic unity. 
Joanna's history bisects into two opposite hemispheres, 
and both could not have been presented to the eye in one 
poem, unless by sacrificing all unity of theme, or else by 
involving the earlier half, as a narrative episode, in the 
latter; which, however, might have been done, for it 
might have been communicated to a fellow-prisoner, or a 
confessor, by Joanna herself. It is sufficient, as concerns 
this section of Joanna's life, to say that she fulfilled, to the 
height of her promises, the restoration of the prostrate 
throne. France had become a province of England, and 
for the ruin of both, if such a yoke could be maintained. 
Dreadful pecuniary exhaustion caused the EngUsh energy 
to droop ; and that critical opening La Pucelle used with 
a corresponding felicity of audacity and suddenness 
(that were in themselves portentous) for introducing the 
wedge of French native resources, for rekindling the 
national pride, and for planting the dauphin once more 
upon his feet. When Joanna appeared, he had been on 
the point of giving up the struggle with the English, dis- 



26 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

tressed as they were, and of flying to the south of France. 
She taught him to blush for such abject counsels. She 
liberated Orleans, that great city, so decisive by its fate 
for the issue of the war, and then beleaguered by the 
English with an elaborate application of engineering skill 
unprecedented in Europe. Entering the city after sunset 
on the 29th of April, she sang mass on Sunday, May 8th, 
for the entire disappearance of the besieging force. On 
the 29th of June she fought and gained over the English 
the decisive battle of Patay ; on the 9th of July she took 
Troyes by a conp-de-main° from a mixed garrison of English 
and Burgundians ; on the 15th of that month she carried 
the dauphin into Rheims; on Sunday the 17 th she 
crowned him ; and there she rested from her labour of 
triumph. All that was to be done she had now accom- 
plished ; what remained was — to suffer. 

21. All this forward movement was her own ; excepting 
one man, the whole council was against her. Her enemies 
were all that drew power from earth. Her supporters 
were her own strong enthusiasm, and the headlong con- 
tagion by which she carried this subhme frenzy into the 
hearts of women, of soldiers, and of all who lived by 
labour. Henceforward she was thwarted ; and the worst 
error that she committed was to lend the sanction of her 
presence to counsels which she had ceased to approve. 
But she had now accomplished the capital objects which 
her own visions had dictated. These involved all the rest. 
Errors were now less important ; and doubtless it had 
now become more difficult for herself to pronounce 
authentically what were errors. The noble girl had 
achieved, as by a rapture of motion, the capital end of 



JOAN OF ARC 27 

clearing out a free space around her sovereign, giving 
him the power to move his arms with effect, and, secondly, 
the inappreciable ° end of winning for that sovereign what 
seemed to all France the heavenly ratification of his rights, 
by crowning him with the ancient solemnities. She had 
made it impossible for the English now to step before her. 
They were caught in an irretrievable blunder, owing partly 
to discord among the uncles of Henry VI., partly to a want 
of funds, but partly to the very impossibility which they 
beHeved to press with tenfold force upon any French 
attempt to forestall theirs. They laughed at such a 
thought ; and, while they laughed, she did it. Henceforth 
the single redress for the Enghsh of this capital oversight, 
but which never cou/d have redressed it effectually, was 
to vitiate and taint the coronation of Charles VII. as the 
work of a witch. That policy, and not malice (as M. 
Michelet is so happy to believe), was the moving principle 
in the subsequent prosecution of Joanna. Unless they 
unhinged the force of the first coronation in the popular 
mind by associating it with power given from hell, they 
felt that the sceptre of the invader was broken. 

22. But she, the child that, at nineteen, had wrought 
wonders so great for France, was she not elated ? Did 
she not lose, as men so often kam lost, all sobriety of 
mind when standing upon the pinnacle of success so 
giddy? Let her enemies declare. During the progress 
of her movement, and in the centre of ferocious struggles, 
she had manifested the temper of her feelings by the 
pity which she had everywhere expressed for the suffer- 
ing enemy. She forwarded to the English leaders a touch- 
ing invitation to unite with the French, as brothers, in a 



28 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

common crusade against infidels — thus opening the road 
for a soldierly retreat. She interposed to protect the 
captive or the wounded ; she mourned over the excesses 
of her countrymen ; she threw herself off her horse to 
kneel by the dying English soldier, and to comfort him 
with such ministrations, physical or spiritual, as his situ- 
ation allowed. "Nolebat,"° says the evidence, "uti 
ense suo, aut quemquam interficere." She sheltered the 
English that invoked her aid in her own quarters. She 
wept as she beheld, stretched on the field of battle, so 
many brave enemies that had died without confession. 
And, as regarded herself, her elation expressed itself thus : 
on the day when she had finished her work, she wept ; for 
she knew that, when her triumphal task was done, her 
end must be approaching. Her aspirations pointed only 
to a place which seemed to her more than usually full of 
natural piety, as one in which it would give her pleasure 
to die. And she uttered, between smiles and tears, as a 
wish that inexpressibly fascinated her heart, and yet was 
half fantastic, a broken prayer that God would return 
her to the solitudes from which he had drawn her, and 
suffer her to become a shepherdess once more. It was 
a natural prayer, because nature has laid a necessity upon 
every human heart to seek for rest and to shrink from 
torment. Yet, again, it was a half-fantastic prayer, be- 
cause, from childhood upward, visions that she had no 
power to mistrust, and the voices which sounded in 
her ear for ever, had long since persuaded her mind that 
for her no such prayer could be granted. Too well she 
felt that her mission must be worked out to the end, and 
that the end was now at hand. All went wrong from this 



JOAN OF ARC 29 

time. She herself had created the funds out of which the 
French restoration should grow ; but she was not suffered 
to witness their development or their prosperous applica- 
tion. More than one military plan was entered upon 
which she did not approve. But she still continued to 
expose her person as before. Severe wounds had not 
taught her caution. And at length, in a sortie from 
Compiegne (whether through treacherous collusion on 
the part of her own friends is doubtful to this day) 
she was made prisoner by the Burgundians, and finally 
surrendered to the English. 

23. Now came her trial. This trial, moving of course 
under English influence, was conducted in chief by the 
Bishop of Beauvais.° He was a Frenchman, sold to Eng- 
lish interests, and hoping, by favour of the English leaders, 
to reach the highest preferment. " Bishop that art. Arch- 
bishop that shalt be, Cardinal that may est be," were the 
words that sounded continually in his ear ; and doubtless 
a whisper of visions still higher, of a triple crown,° and 
feet upon the necks of kings, sometimes stole into his 
heart. M. Michelet is anxious to keep us in mind that 
this bishop was but an agent of the English. True. But 
it does not better the case for his countryman that, being 
an accomplice in the crime, making himself the leader in 
the persecution against the helpless girl, he was willing to 
be all this in the spirit, and with the conscious vileness of 
a cat's-paw. Never from the foundations of the earth was 
there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its 
beauty of defence and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, 
child of France ! shepherdess, peasant girl ! trodden under 
foot by all around thee, how I honour thy flashing intellect, 



30 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

quick as God's lightning, and true as God's lightning to its 
mark, that ran before France and laggard Europe by many 
a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and 
making dumb the oracles of falsehood ! Is it not scanda- 
lous, is it not humiliating to civilisation, that, even at this 
day, France exhibits the horrid spectacle of judges ex- 
amining the prisoner against himself °j seducing him, by 
fraud, into treacherous conclusions against his own head • 
using the terrors of their power for extorting confessions 
from the frailty of hope : nay (which is worse), using the 
blandishments of condescension and snaky kindness for 
thawing into compliances of gratitude those whom they 
had failed to freeze into terror? Wicked judges ! barbarian 
jurisprudence 1 — that, sitting in your own conceit on the 
summits of social wisdom, have yet failed to learn the first 
principles of criminal justice — sit ye humbly and with 
docility at the feet of this girl from Domremy, that tore 
your webs of cruelty into shreds and dust. " Would you 
examine me as a witness against myself?" was the question 
by which many times she defied their arts. Continually 
she showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any 
business before the court, or that entered into the ridiculous 
charges against her. General questions were proposed to 
her on points of casuistical divinity ; two-edged questions, 
which not one of themselves could have answered, with- 
out, on the one side, landing himself in heresy (as then 
interpreted), or, on the other, in some presumptuous ex- 
pression of self-esteem. Next came a wretched Dominican, 
that pressed her with an objection, which, if applied to 
the Bible, would tax every one of its miracles with un- 
soundness. The monk had the excuse of never having 



JOAN Of arc 31 

read the Bible. M. Michelet has no such excuse ; and it 
makes one blush for him, as a philosopher, to find him 
describing such an argument as " weighty," whereas it is 
but a varied expression of rude Mahometan metaphysics. 
Her answer to this, if there were room to place the whole 
in a clear light, was as shattering as it was rapid. An- 
other thought to entrap her by asking what language the 
angelic visitors of her solitude had talked — as though 
heavenly counsels could want polyglot interpreters for 
every word, or that God needed language at all in whis- 
pering thoughts to a human heart. Then came a worse 
devil, who asked her whether the Archangel Michael had 
appeared naked. Not comprehending the vile insinuation, 
Joanna, whose poverty suggested to her simplicity that it 
might be the costliness of suitable robes which caused 
the demur, asked them if they fancied God, who clothed 
the flowers of the valleys, unable to find raiment for his 
servants. The answer of Joanna moves a smile of tender- 
ness, but the disappointment of her judges makes one 
laugh exultingly. Others succeeded by troops, who up- 
braided her with leaving her father ; as if that greater 
Father, whom she beheved herself to have been serving, 
did not retain the power of dispensing with his own rules, 
or had not said that for a less cause than martyrdom man 
and woman should leave both father and mother. 

24. On Easter Sunday, when the trial had been long 
proceeding, the poor girl fell so ill as to cause a belief that 
she had been poisoned. It was not poison. Nobody had 
any interest in hastening a death so certain. M. Michelet, 
whose sympathies with all feelings are so quick that one 
would gladly see them always as justly directed, reads the 



32 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

case most truly. Joanna had a twofold malady. She was 
visited by a paroxysm of the complaint called homesickness. 
The cruel nature of her imprisonment, and its length, 
could not but point her sohtary thoughts, in darkness and 
in chains (for chained she was), to Domremy. And the 
season, which was the most heavenly period of the spring, 
added stings to this yearning. That was one of her mala- 
dies — nostalgia, as medicine calls it ; the other was weari- 
ness and exhaustion from daily combats with malice. She 
saw that everybody hated her and thirsted for her blood ; 
nay, many kind-hearted creatures that would have pitied 
her profoundly, as regarded all political charges, had their 
natural feelings warped by the belief that she had deahngs 
with fiendish powers. She knew she was to die ; that was 
not the misery ! the misery was that this consummation 
could not be reached without so much intermediate strife, 
as if she were contending for some chance (where chance 
was none) of happiness, or were dreaming for a moment 
of escaping the inevitable. Why, then, did she contend ? 
Knowing that she would reap nothing from answering her 
persecutors, why did she not retire by silence from the 
superfluous contest? It was because her quick and eager 
loyalty to truth would not suffer her to see it darkened by 
frauds which she could expose, but others, even of candid 
listeners, perhaps could not ; it was through that imperish- 
able grandeur of soul which taught her to submit meekly 
and without a struggle to her punishment, but taught her 
not to submit — no, not for a moment — to calumny as to 
facts, or to misconstruction as to motives. Besides, there 
were secretaries all around the court taking down her 
words. That was meant for no good to her. But the end 



JOAN OF ARC 33 

does not always correspond to the meaning. And Joanna 
might say to herself, "These words that will be used 
against me to-morrow and the next day, perhaps, in some 
nobler generation, may rise again for my justification." 
Yes, Joanna, they are rising even now in Paris, and for 
more than justification ! 

25. Woman, sister, there are some things which you do 
not execute as well as your brother, man ; no, nor ever 
will. Pardon me if I doubt whether you will ever produce 
a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, 
or a Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a great 
scholar. By which last is meant — not one who depends 
simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and 
electrical power of combination ; bringing together from 
the four winds, Hke the angel of the resurrection, what else 
were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breath- 
ing life. If you caii create yourselves into any of these 
great creators, w)iy have you not ? 

26. Yet, sister woman, though I cannot consent to find 
a Mozart or a Michael Angelo in your sex, cheerfully, and 
with the love that burns in depths of admiration, I acknow- 
ledge that you can do one thing as well as the best of us 
men — a greater thing than even Milton is known to have 
done, or Michael Angelo; you can die grandly, and as 
goddesses would die, were goddesses mortaL If any dis- 
tant worlds (which may be the case) are so far ahead of 
us Tellurians in optical resources as to see disdnctly 
through their telescopes all that we do on earth, what is 
the grandest sight to which we ever treat them ? St. Peter's 
at Rome, do you fancy, on Easter Sunday, or Luxor,° or 
perhaps the Himalayas ? Oh, no ! my friend ; suggest 



34 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

something better ; these are baubles to them; they see in 
other worlds, in their own, far better toys of the same kind. 
These, take my word for it, are nothing. Do you give it 
up? The finest thing, then, we have to show them is a 
scaffold on the morning of execution. I assure you there 
is a strong muster in those far telescopic worlds, on any 
such morning, of those who happen to find themselves 
occupying the right hemisphere for a peep at us. How, 
then, if it be announced in some such telescopic world by 
those who make a livelihood of catching glimpses at our 
newspapers, whose language they have long since deci- 
phered, that the poor victim in the morning's sacrifice is 
a woman? How, if it be published in that distant world 
that the sufferer wears upon her head, in the eyes of many, 
the garlands of martyrdom ? How, if it should be some 
Marie Antoinette,° the widowed queen, coming forward on 
the scaffold, and presenting to the morning air her head, 
turned gray by sorrow — daughter of Caesars kneeling 
down humbly to kiss the guillotine, as one that worships 
death? How, if it were the noble Charlotte Corday,° 
that in the bloom of youth, that with the loveHest of persons, 
that with homage waiting upon her smiles wherever she 
turned her face to scatter them — homage that followed 
those smiles as surely as the carols of the birds, after 
showers in spring, follow the reappearing sun and the rac- 
ing of sunbeams over the hills — yet thought all these 
things cheaper than the dust upon her sandals, in com- 
parison of deliverance from hell for her dear suffering 
France ! Ah ! these were spectacles indeed for those 
sympathising people in distant worlds ; and some, perhaps, 
would suffer a sort of martyrdom themselves, because 



JOAN OF ARC 35 

they could not testify their wrath, could not bear witness 
to the strength of love and to the fury of hatred that 
burned within them at such scenes, could not gather 
into golden urns some of that glorious dust which rested 
in the catacombs of earth. 

27. On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 143 1, 
being then about nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc 
underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted before 
mid-day, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform 
of prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets sup- 
ported by occasional walls of lath and plaster, and traversed 
by hollow spaces in every direction for the creation of air 
currents. The pile " struck terror," says M. Michelet, " by 
its height " ; and, as usual, the English purpose in this is 
viewed as one of pure mahgnity. But there are two ways 
of explaining all that. It is probable that the purpose 
was merciful. On the circumstances of the execution I 
shall not linger. Yet, to mark the almost fatal felicity of 
M. Michelet in finding out whatever may injure the English 
name, at a moment when every reader will be interested 
in Joanna's personal appearance, it is really edifying to 
notice the ingenuity by which he draws into light from a 
dark corner a very unjust account of it, and neglects, 
though lying upon the highroad, a very pleasing one. Both 
are from English pens. Grafton,° a chronicler, but httle 
read, being a stiff-necked John Bull, thought fit to say that 
no wonder Joanna should be a virgin, since her " foule 
face" was a satisfactory solution of that particular merit. 
HoUnshead,° on the other hand, a chronicler somewhat 
later, every way more important, and at one time uni- 
versally read, has given a very pleasing testimony to the 



36 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

interesting character of Joanna's person and engaging 
manners. Neither of these men lived till the following 
century, so that personally this evidence is none at all. 
Grafton sullenly and carelessly believed as he wished to 
believe ; HoHnshead took pains to inquire, and reports 
undoubtedly the general impression of France. But I 
cite the case as illustrating M. Michelet's candour.^ 

1 Amongst the many ebullitions of M. Michelet's fury against us poor 
English are four which will be Hkely to amuse the reader; and they are 
the more conspicuous in collision with the justice which he sometimes 
does us, and the very indignant admiration which, under some aspects, 
he grants to us. 

1. Our English literature he admires with some gnashing of teeth. 
He pronounces it " fine and sombre," but, I lament to add, " sceptical, 
Judaic, Satanic — in a word, antichristian." That Lord Byron should 
figure as a member of this diabolical corporation will not surprise men. 
It will surprise them to hear that Milton is one of its Satanic leaders. 
Many are the generous and eloquent Frenchmen, besides Chateau- 
briand who have, in the course of the last thirty years, nobly suspended 
their own burning nationality, in order to render a more rapturous 
homage at the feet of Milton ; and some of them have raised Milton 
almost to a level with angelic natures. Not one of them has thought 
of looking for him below the earth. As to Shakspere, M. Michelet 
detects in him a most extraordinary mare's nest. It is this : he does 
"not recollect to have seen the name of God" in any part of his 
works. On reading such words, it is natural to rub one's eyes, and sus- 
pect that all one has ever seen in this world may have been a pure 
ocular delusion. In particular, I begin myself to suspect that the 
word " la gloire " never occurs in any Parisian journal. " The great 
English nation," says M. Michelet, " has one immense profound vice" 
— to wit, "pride." Why, really, that may be true; but we have a 
neighbour not absolutely clear of an " immense profound vice," as like 
ours in colour and shape as cherry to cherry. In short, M. Michelet 
thinks us, by fits and starts, admirable — only that we are detestable; 
and he would adore some of our authors, were it not that so intensely 
he could have wished to kick them. 

2. M. Michelet thinks to lodge an arrow in our sides by a very odd 
remark upon Thomas k Kempis : which is, that a man of any conceiv- 



JOAN OF ARC 37 

able European blood — a Finlander, suppose, or a Zantiote — might 
have written Tom ; only not an Englishman. Whether an Englishman 
could have forged Tom must remain a matter of doubt, unless the 
thing had been tried long ago. That problem was intercepted for ever 
by Tom's perverseness in choosing to manufacture himself. Yet, since 
nobody is better aware than M. Michelet that this very point of Kempis 
having manufactured Kempis is furiously and hopelessly litigated, three 
or four nations claiming to have forged his work for him, the shocking 
old doubt will raise its snaky head once more — whether this forger, 
who rests in so much darkness, might not, after all, be of English 
blood. Tom, it may be feared, is known to modern English literature 
chiefly by an irreverent mention of his name in a line of Peter Pindar's 
(Dr. Wolcot) fifty years back, where he is described as 

" Kempis Tom, 
Who clearly shows the way to Kingdom Come." 

Few in these days can have read him, unless in the Methodist version of 
John Wesley. Among those few, however, happens to be myself; 
which arose from the accident of having, when a boy of eleven, received 
a copy of the " De Imitatione Christi " as a bequest from a relation 
who died very young ; from which cause, and from the external pretti- 
ness of the book — being a Glasgow reprint by the celebrated Foulis, 
and gaily bound — I was induced to look into it, and finally read it 
many times over, partly out of some sympathy which, even in those 
days, I had with its simplicity and devotional fervour, but much more 
from the savage delight I found in laughing at Tom's Latinity, That, I 
freely grant to M. Michelet, is inimitable. Yet, after all, it is not cer- 
tain whether the original was Latin. But, however, that may have 
been, if it is possible that M. Michelet* can be accurate in saying that 
there are no less than sixty French versions (not editions, observe, but 

* " IfM. Michelet can be accurate " : — However, on consideration, this state- 
ment does not depend on Michelet. The bibliographer Barbier has absolutely 
specified sixty in a separate dissertation, soixante traductions, among those 
even that have not escaped the search. The Italian translations are said to be 
thirty. As to mere editions, not counting the early MSS. for half a century 
before printing was introduced, those in Latin amount to 2000, and those in 
French 1000. Meantime, it is very clear to me that this astonishing popularity 
so entirely unparalleled in literature, could not have existed except in Roman 
Catholic times, nor subsequently have lingered in any Protestant land. It was 
the denial of Scripture fountains to thirsty lands which made this slender rill of 
Scripture truth so passionately welcome. 



38 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

separate versions) existing of the " De Imitatione," how prodigious 
inust have been the adaptation of the book to the rehgious heart of the 
fifteenth century! Excepting the Bible, but excepting that only in 
Protestant lands, no book known to man has had the same distinction. 
It is the most marvellous bibhographical fact on record. 

3. Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we English 
males in another. None of us men could have written the Opera Omnia 
of M. a Kempis ; neither could any of our girls have assumed male 
attire like La Pucelle. But why ? Because, says Michelet, English 
girls and German think so much of an indecorum. Well, that is a 
good fault, generally speaking. But M. Michelet ought to have remem- 
bered a fact in the martyrologies which justifies both parties — the 
French heroine for doing, and the general choir of English giils for 
not doing. A female saint, specially renowned in France, had, for a 
reason as weighty as Joanna's — viz., expressly to shield her modesty 
among men — worn a male military harness. That reason and that 
example authorised La Pucelle ; but our English girls, as a body, have 
seldom any such reason, and certainly no such saintly example, to 
plead. This excuses them. Yet, still, if it is indispensable to the 
national character that our young women should now and then tres- 
pass over the frontier of decorum, it then becomes a patriotic duty in 
me to assure M. Michelet that we have such ardent females among us, 
and in a long series ; some detected in naval hospitals when too sick to . 
remember their disguise; some on fields of battle; muhitudes nsver 
detected at all; some only suspected; and others discharged without 
noise by war offices and other absurd people. In our navy, both royal 
and commercial, and generally from deep remembrances of slighted 
love, women have sometimes served in disguise for many years, taking 
contentedly their daily allowance of burgoo, biscuit, or cannon-balls — 
anything, in short, digestible or indigestible, that it might please Provi- 
dence to send. One thing, at least, is to their credit : never any of 
these poor masks, with their deep silent remembrances, have been 
detected through murmuring, or what is nautically understood by 
" skulking." So, for once, M. Michelet has an erratum to enter upon 
the fiy-leaf of his book in presentation copies. 

4. But the last of these ebullitions is the most lively. We English, 
at Orleans, and after Orleans (which is not quite so extraordinary, if all 
were told), fled before the Maid of Arc. Yes, says M. Michelet, you 
did: deny it, if you can. Deny it, itioji cher? I don't mean to deny 
it. Running away, in many cases, is a thing so excellent that no phi- 



JOAN OF ARC 39 

28. The circumstantial incidents of the execution, un- 
less with more space than I can now command, I should 
be unwilling to relate. I should fear to injure, by im- 
perfect report, a martyrdom which to myself appears so 
unspeakably grand. Yet, for a purpose, pointing not at 
Joanna, but at M. Michelet — viz., to convince him that 
an Englishman is capable of thinking more highly of La 
Pucelle than even her admiring countrymen — I shall, 
in parting, allude to one or two traits in Joanna's de- 
meanour on the scaffold, and to one or two in that of the 
bystanders, which authorise me in questioning an opinion 

losopher would, at times, condescend to adopt any other step. All of 
us nations in Europe, without one exception, have shown our phi- 
losophy in that way at times. Even people " qui ne se rendent pas " 
have deigned both to run and to shout. " Sauve quipeut!" at odd 
times of sunset ; though, for my part, I have no pleasure in recalling 
unpleasant remembrances to brave men ; and yet, really, being so philo- 
sophic, they ought not to be unpleasant. But the amusing feature in 
M. Michelet's reproach is the way in which he itnproves and varies 
against us the charge of running, as if he were singing a catch. Listen 
to him : They " showed their backs," did these English. (Hip, hip, 
hurrah! three times three!) " Behind good walls they let themselves be 
taken." (Hip, hip ! nine times nine !) They " ran as fast as their legs 
could carry them." (Hurrah ! twenty-seven times twenty-seven !) They 
''ran before a girl" ; they did. (Hurrah! eighty-one times eighty- 
one !) This reminds one of criminal indictments on the old model 
in English courts, where (for fear the prisoner should escape) the crown 
lawyer varied the charge perhaps through forty counts. The law laid 
its guns so as to rake the accused at every possible angle. While the 
indictment was reading, he seemed a monster of crime in his own 
eyes ; and yet, after all, the poor fellow had but committed one offence, 
and not always that. N. B, — Not having the French original at 
hand, I make my quotations from a friend's copy of Mr. Walter Kelly's 
translation ; which seems to me faithful, spirited, and idiomatically 
English — liable, in fact, only to the single reproach of occasional 
provincialisms. 



40 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

of his upon this martyr's firmness. The reader ought to 
be reminded that Joanna D'Arc was subjected to an un- 
usually unfair trial of opinion. Any of the elder Chris- 
tian martyrs had not much to fear of personal rancour. 
The martyr was chiefly regarded as the enemy of Caesar ; 
at times, also, where any knowledge of the Christian faith 
and morals existed, with the enmity that arises sponta- 
neously in the worldly against the spiritual. But the 
martyr, though disloyal, was not supposed to be there- 
fore anti-national ; and still less was individually hateful. 
What was hated (if anything) belonged to his class, not 
to himself separately. Now, Joanna, if hated at all, was 
hated personally, and in Rouen on national grounds. 
Hence there would be a certainty of calumny arising 
against her such as would not affect martyrs in general. 
That being the case, it would follow of necessity that 
some people would impute to her a willingness to recant. 
No innocence could escape that. Now, had she really 
testified this willingness on the scaffold, it would have 
argued nothing at all but the weakness of a genial nature 
shrinking from the instant approach of torment. And 
those will often pity that weakness most who, in their 
own persons, would yield to it least. Meantime, there 
never was a calumny uttered that drew less support from 
the recorded circumstances. It rests upon no positive 
testimony, and it has a weight of contradicting testimony 
to stem. And yet, strange to say, M. Michelet, who at 
times seems to admire the Maid of Arc as much as I do, 
is the one sole writer among her friends who lends some 
countenance to this odious slander. His words are that, 
if she did not utter this word recant with her lips, she 



JOAN OF ARC 41 

uttered it in her heart. " Whether she said the word is 
uncertain ; but I affirm that she thought it." 

29. Now, I affirm that she did not ; not in any sense 
of the word ^^ thought'' appHcable to the case. Here is 
France calumniating La Pucelle ; here is England de- 
fending her. M. Michelet can only mean that, on a 
priori° principles, every woman must be presumed liable 
to such a weakness ; that Joanna was a woman ; ergo, 
that she was Hable to such a weakness. That is, he only 
supposes her to have uttered the word by an argument 
which presumes it impossible for anybody to have done 
otherwise. I, on the contrary, throw the onus of the 
argument not on presumable tendencies of nature, but on 
the known facts of that morning's execution, as recorded 
by multitudes. What else, I demand, than mere 
weight of metal, absolute nobility of deportment, broke 
the vast Hne of battle then arrayed against her ? What 
else but her meek, saintly demeanour won, from the ene- 
mies that till now had beHeved her a witch, tears of rap- 
turous admiration? 'jrYen thousand men," says M. 
Michelet himself — "tela thousand men wept"; and of 
these ten thousand the majority were political enemies 
knitted together by cords of superstition. What else was 
it but her constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, 
that drove the fanatic English soldier — who had sworn 
to throw a fagot on her scaffold as his tribute of abhor- 
rence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow — suddenly to 
turn away a penitent for hfe, saying everywhere that he 
had seen a dove rising upon wings to heaven from the 
ashes where she had stood? What else drove the exe 
cutioner to kneel at every shrine for pardon to his shar 



■:) 



42 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

in the tragedy? And, if all this were insufficient, then I 
cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were 
all other testimonies against her. The executioner had 
been directed to apply his torch from below. He did 
so. The fiery smoke rose upward in billowing volumes. 
A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. 
Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, 
but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the 
last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, 
even at that moment did this noblest of girls think only 
for hhn, the one friend that would not forsake her, and 
not for herself; bidding him with her last breath to care 
for his own preservation, but to leave her to God. That 
girl, whose latest breath ascended in this sublime expres- 
sion of self-oblivion, did not utter the word recant either 
with her lips or in her heart. No ; she did not, though 
one should rise from the dead to swear it. 

****** 
30. Bishop of Beauvais ! thy victim died in fire upon 
a scaffold — thou upon a down bed. But, for the de- 
parting minutes of life, both are oftentimes ahke. At 
the farewell crisis, when the gates of death are opening, 
and flesh is resting from its struggles, oftentimes the 
tortured and the torturer have the same truce from 
carnal torment ; both sink together into sleep ; together 
both sometimes kindle into dreams. When the mortal 
mists were gathering fast upon you two, bishop and 
shepherd girl — when the pavilions of life were closing 
up their shadowy curtains about you — let us try, through 
the gigantic glooms, to decipher the flying features of 
your separate visions. 



JOAN OF ARC 43 

31. The shepherd girl that had delivered 'France — 
she, from her dungeon, she, from her baiting at the 
stake, she, from her duel with fire, as she entered her 
last dream — saw Domremy, saw the fountain of Dom- 
r^my, saw the pomp of forests in which her childhood 
had wandered. That Easter festival which man had 
denied to her languishing heart — that resurrection of 
springtime, which the darkness of dungeons had inter- 
cepted from her, hungering after the glorious liberty of 
forests — were by God given back into her hands as 
jewels that had been stolen from her by robbers. With 
those, perhaps (for the minutes of dreams can stretch 
into ages), was given back to her by God the bliss of 
childhood. By special privilege for her might be 
created, in this farewell dream, a second childhood, 
innocent as the first ; but not, like that, sad with the 
gloom of a fearful mission in the rear. This mission had 
now been fulfilled. The storm was weathered ; the 
skirts even of that mighty storm were drawing off. The 
blood that she was to reckon for had been exacted ; the 
tears that she was to shed in secret had been paid to 
the last. The hatred to herself in all eyes had been 
faced steadily, had been suffered, had been survived. 
And in her last fight upon the scaffold she had tri- 
umphed gloriously ; victoriously she had tasted the stings 
of death. For all, except this comfort from her fare- 
well dream, she had died — died amid the tears of ten 
thousand enemies — died amid the drums and trump- 
ets of armies — died amid peals redoubhng upon peals, 
volleys upon volleys, from the saluting clarions of 
martyrs. 



44 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

32. Bishop of Beauvais ! because the guilt-burdened 
man is in dreams haunted and waylaid by the most 
frightful of his crimes, and because upon that fluctuating 
mirror — rising (like the mocking mirrors of nib-age in 
Arabian deserts) from the fens of death — most of all 
are reflected the sweet countenances which the man has 
laid in ruins; therefore I know, bishop, that you also, 
entering your final dream, saw Domr^my. That fountain, 
of which the witnesses spoke so much, showed itself to 
your eyes in pure morning dews ; but neither dews, nor 
the holy dawn, could cleanse away the bright spots of 
innocent blood upon its surface. By the fountain, bishop, 
you saw a woman seated, that hid her face. But, as you 
draw near, the woman raises her wasted features. Would 
Domr^my know them again for the features of her child ? 
Ah, but you know them, bishop, well ! Oh, mercy ! 
what a groan was that which the servants, waiting outside 
the bishop's dream at his bedside, heard from his labour- 
ing heart, as at this moment he turned away from the 
fountain and the woman, seeking rest in the forests afar 
off. Yet not so to escape the woman, whom once again 
he must behold before he dies. In the forests to which 
he prays for pity, will he find a respite ? What a tumult, 
what a gathering of feet is there ! In glades where only 
wild deer should run armies and nations are assembling ; 
towering in the fluctuating crowd are phantoms that 
belong to departed hours. There is the great English 
Prince, Regent of France. There is my Lord of Win- 
chester, the princely cardinal, that died and made no 
sign. There is the bishop of Beauvais, chnging to the 
shelter of thickets. What building is that which hands 



JOAN OF ARC 45 

so rapid are raising? Is it a martyr's scaffold? Will 
they burn the child of Domr^my a second time? No ; it 
is a tribunal that rises to the clouds; and two nations 
stand around it, waiting for a trial. Shall my Lord of 
Beauvais sit again upon the judgment-seat, and again 
number the hours for the innocent ? Ah, no ! he is the 
prisoner at the bar. Already all is waiting : the mighty 
audience is gathered, the Court is hurrying to their seats, 
the witnesses are arrayed, the trumpets are sounding, the 
judge is* taking his place. Oh, but this is sudden ! My 
lord, have you no counsel ? " Counsel I have none ; in 
heaven above, or on earth beneath, counsellor there is 
none r\ow that would take a brief from me: all are 
silent." Is it, indeed, come to this? Alas ! the time is 
short, the tumult is wondrous, the crowd stretches away 
into infinity ; but yet I will search in it for somebody to 
take your brief; I know of somebody that will be your 
counsel. Who is this that cometh from Domr^my? 
Who is she in bloody coronation robes from Rheims? 
Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh from walk- 
ing the furnaces of Rouen? This is she, the shepherd 
girl, counsellor that had none for herself, whom I choose, 
bishop, for yours. She it is, I engage, that shall take my 
lord's brief. She it is, bishop, that would plead for you; 
yes, bishop, she — when heaven and earth are silent. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 

Section the First — The Glory of Motion 

1. Some twenty or more years before I matriculated 
at Oxford, Mr. Palmer,° at that time M.P. for Bath, had 
accomplished two things, very hard to do on our little 
planet, the Earth, however cheap they may be held by 
eccentric people in comets — he had invented mail- 
coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke.° 
He was, therefore, just twice as great a man as Galileo, 
who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing,^ 
discover) the satelHtes of Jupiter, those very next things 
extant to mail-coaches in the two capital pretensions of 
speed and keeping time, but, on the other hand, who did 
not marry the daughter of a duke. 

2. These mail-coaches, as organised by Mr. Palmer, 
are entitled to a circumstantial notice from myself, having 
had so large a share in developing the anarchies of my 
subsequent dreams : an agency which they accomplished, 
ist, through velocity at that time unprecedented — for they 
first revealed the glory of motion ; 2dly, through grand 
effects for the eye between lamplight and the darkness 
upon solitary roads ; 3dly, through animal beauty and 

1 " The same thing" : — Thus, in the calendar of the Church Festivals, 
the discovery of the true cross (by Helen, the mother of Constantine) 
is recorded (and, one might think,, with the express consciousness of 
sarcasm) as the Invention of the Cross. 

49 



50 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

power so often displayed in the class of horses selected 
for this mail service ; 4thly, through the conscious pres- 
ence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast° 
distances^ — of storms, of darkness, of danger — over- 
ruled all obstacles into one steady cooperation to a 
national result. For my own feeling, this post-office 
service spoke as by some mighty orchestra, where a 
thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so 
far in danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the 
supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a per- 
fection of harmony like that of heart, brain, and lungs in 
a healthy animal organisation. But, finally, that particular 
element in this whole combination which most impressed 
myself, and through which it is that to this hour Mr. 
Palmer's mail-coach system tyrannises over my dreams 
by terror and terrific beauty, lay in the awful political 
mission which at that time it fulfilled. The mail-coach 
it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the 
opening of apocalyptic vials,° the heart-shaking news 
of Trafalgar,® of Salamanca,° of Vittoria,° of Waterloo. 
These were the harvests that, in the grandeur of their 
reaping, redeemed the tears and blood in which they 
had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so 
much below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times 
as to confound battles such as these, which were gradu- 
ally moulding the destinies of Christendom, with the 
vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, so often no more 

"^'^ Vast distances": — One case was familiar to mail-coach travellers 
where two mails in opposite directions, north and south, starting at 
the same minute from points six hundred miles apart, met almost con- 
stantly at a particular bridge which bisected the total distance. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 51 

than gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The victo- 
ries of England in this stupendous contest rose of 
themselves as natural Te Dettms to heaven ; and it was 
felt by the thoughtful that such victories, at such a crisis 
of general prostration, were not more beneficial to our- 
selves than finally to France, our enemy, and to the 
nations of all western or central Europe, through whose 
pusillanimity it was that the French domination had 
prospered. 

3. The mail-coach, as the national organ for publish- 
ing these mighty events, thus diffusively influential, 
became itself a spirituahsed and glorified object to an 
impassioned heart ; and naturally, in the Oxford of that 
day, all hearts were impassioned, as being all (or nearly 
all) in early manhood. In most universities ° there is 
one single college ; in Oxford there were five-and-twenty, 
all of which were peopled by young men, the elite of their 
own generation ; not boys, but men : none under 
eighteen. In some of these many colleges the custom 
permitted the student to keep what are called " short 
terms " ; that is, the four terms of Michaelmas, Lent, 
Easter, and Act,° were kept by a residence, in the ag- 
gregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under 
this interrupted residence, it was possible that a student 
might have a reason for going down ° to his home four 
times in the year. This made eight journeys to and fro. 
But, as these homes lay dispersed through all the shires 
of the island, and most of us disdained all coaches except 
his Majesty's mail, no city out of London could pretend 
to so extensive a connexion with Mr. Palmer's estabhsh- 
ment as Oxford. Three mails, at the least, I remember 



52 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

as passing every day through Oxford, and benefiting by 
my personal patronage — viz., the Worcester, the Glouces- 
ter, and the Holyhead mail. Naturally, therefore, it 
became a point of some interest with us, whose journeys 
revolved every six weeks on an average, to look a little 
into the executive details of the system. With some of 
these Mr. Palmer had no concern ; they rested upon bye- 
laws enacted by posting-houses for their own benefit, and 
upon other bye- laws, equally stern, enacted by the inside 
passengers for the illustration of their own haughty ex- 
clusiveness. These last were of a nature to rouse our 
scorn, from which the transition was not very long to 
systematic mutiny. Up to this time, say 1804, or 1805 
(the year of Trafalgar), it had been the fixed assumption 
of the four inside people (as an old tradition of all public 
carriages derived from the reign of Charles II.) that they, 
the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety 
of the human race, whose dignity would have been com- 
promised by exchanging one word of civility with the 
three miserable delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked 
an outsider might have been held to attaint ° the foot con- 
cerned in that operation, so that, perhaps, it would have 
required an act of Parliament to restore its purity of 
blood. What words, then, could express the horror, and 
the sense of treason, in that case, which ka^ happened, 
where all three outsides (the trinity of Pariahs °) made a 
vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast-table or 
dinner-table with the consecrated four? I myself wit- 
nessed such an attempt ; and on that occasion a benevo- 
lent old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy 
associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were in- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 53 

dieted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the 
court would regard it as a case of lunacy or delirium tre- 
7nens rather than of treason. England owes much of her 
grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her 
social composition, when pulHng against her strong de- 
mocracy. I am not the man to laugh at it. But some- 
times, undoubtedly, it expressed itself in comic shapes. 
The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the 
particular attempt which I have noticed, was that the 
waiter, beckoning them away from the privileged salle- 
d-manger° sang out, "This way, my good men," and 
then enticed these good men away to the kitchen. But 
that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though 
rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger 
than usual, or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused 
to budge, and so far carried their point as to have a 
separate table arranged for themselves in a corner of the 
general room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found 
ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of 
the high table, or dais^ it then became possible to as- 
sume as a fiction of law that the three delf fellows, after 
all, were not present. They could be ignored by the 
porcelain men, under the maxim that objects not appear- 
ing and objects not existing are governed by the same 
logical construction.^ 

4. Such being, at that time, the usage of mail-coaches, 
what was to be done by us of young Oxford? We, the 
most aristocratic of people, who were addicted to the prac- 
tice of looking down superciliously even upon the insides 
themselves as often very questionable characters — were 

1 De non apparentibus, etc. 



54 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

we, by voluntarily going outside, to court indignities? If 
our dress and bearing sheltered us generally from the sus- 
picion of being "raff" (the name at that period for 
" snobs " ^), we really wej-e such constructively by the place 
we assumed. If we did not submit to the deep shadow of 
eclipse, we entered at least the skirts of its penumbra.° 
And the analogy of theatres was valid against us, — where 
no man can complain of the annoyances incident to the pit 
or gallery, having his instant remedy in paying the higher 
price of the boxes. But the soundness of this analogy we 
disputed. In the case of the theatre, it cannot be pretended 
that the inferior situations have any separate attractions, 
unless the pit may be supposed to have an advantage for the 
purposes of the critic or the dramatic reporter. But the 
critic or reporter is a rarity. For most people, the sole 
benefit is in the price. Now, on the contrary, the out- 
side of the mail had its own incommunicable advantages. 
These we could not forego. The higher price we would 
willingly have paid, but not the price connected with the 
condition of riding inside ; which condition we pro- 
nounced insufferable. The air, the freedom of prospect, 
the proximity to the horses, the elevation of seat : these 
were what we required ; but, above all, the certain antici- 
pation of purchasing occasional opportunities of driving. 
5. Such was the difficulty which pressed us; and un- 
der the coercion of this difficulty we instituted a search- 
ing inquiry into the true quality and valuation of the 

1 "Snobs" and its antithesis, " nobs" arose among the internal factions 
of shoemakers perhaps ten years later. Possibly enough, the terms 
may have existed much earlier; but they were then first made known, 
picturesquely and effectively, by a trial at some assizes which happened 
to fix the public attention. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 55 

different apartments about the mail. We conducted this 
inquiry on metaphysical principles; and it was ascer- 
tained satisfactorily that the roof of the coach, which by 
some weak men had been called the attics, and by some 
the garrets, was in reahty the drawing-room ; in which 
drawing-room the box was the chief ottoman or sofa ; 
whilst it appeared that the inside, which had been tradi- 
tionally regarded as the only room tenantable by gentle- 
men, was, in fact, the coal-cellar in disguise. 

6. Great wits jump.° The very same idea had not 
long before struck the celestial intellect of China. 
Amongst the presents carried out by our first embassy to 
that country was a state-coach. It had been specially 
selected as a personal gift by George III. ; but the exact 
mode of using it was an intense mystery to Pekin. The 
ambassador, indeed (Lord Macartney), had made some 
imperfect explanations upon this point ; but, as His Ex- 
cellency communicated these in a diplomatic whisper at 
the very moment of his departure, the celestial intellect 
was very feebly illuminated, and it became necessary to call 
a cabinet council on the grand state question, "Where was 
the Emperor to sit?" The hammer-cloth° happened to 
be unusually gorgeous ; and, partly on that consideration, 
but partly also because the box offered the most elevated 
seat, was nearest to the moon, and undeniably went fore- 
most, it was resolved by acclamation that the box was 
the imperial throne, and, for the scoundrel who drove, — 
he might sit where he could find a perch. The horses, 
therefore, being harnessed, solemnly his imperial majesty 
ascended his new EngHsh throne under a flourish of 
trumpets, having the first lord of the treasury on his right 



56 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

hand, and the chief jester on his left. Pekin gloried in 
the spectacle; and in the whole flowery people, con- 
structively present by representation, there was but one 
discontented person, and that was the coachman. This 
mutinous individual audaciously shouted, " Where am / 
to sit?" But the privy council, incensed by his disloy- 
alty, unanimously opened the door, and kicked him into 
the inside. He had all the inside places to himself; but 
such is the rapacity of ambition that he was still dissatis- 
fied. " I say," he cried out in an extempore petition 
addressed to the Emperor through the window — "I say, 
how am I to catch hold of the reins?" — "Anyhow," 
was the imperial answer ; " don't trouble me, man, in my 
glory. How catch the reins ? Why, through the windows, 
through the keyholes — ^^zyhow." Finally this contu- 
macious coachman lengthened the check-strings into a 
sort of jury-reins communicating with the horses ; with 
these he drove as steadily as Pekin had any right to ex- 
pect. The Emperor returned after the briefest of cir- 
cuits ; he descended in great pomp from his throne, with 
the severest resolution never to remount it. A pubhc 
thanksgiving was ordered for his majesty's happy escape 
from the disease of a broken neck ; and the state-coach 
was dedicated thenceforward as a votive offering to the 
god Fo Fo — whom the learned more accurately called 
Fi Fi. ° 

7. A revolution of this same Chinese character did 
young Oxford of that era effect in the constitution of 
mail-coach society. It was a perfect French Revolution ; 
and we had good reason to say, <;a ira. In fact, it soon 
became too popular. The "public" — a well-known 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 57 

character, particularly disagreeable, though slightly re- 
spectable, and notorious for affecting the chief seats in 
synagogues — had at first loudly opposed this revolution ; 
but, when the opposition showed itself to be ineffectual, 
our disagreeable friend went into it with headlong zeal. 
At first it was a sort of race between us ; and, as the pub- 
lic is usually from thirty to fifty years old, naturally we 
of young Oxford, that averaged about twenty, had the 
advantage. Then the pubHc took to bribing, giving fees 
to horse-keepers, &c., who hired out their persons as 
warming-pans on the box seat. That, you know, was 
shocking to all moral sensibilities. Come to bribery, 
said we, and there is an end to all morality, — Aristotle's, 
Zeno's, Cicero's,° or anybody's. And, besides, of what 
use was it? For we bribed also. And as our bribes to 
those of the pubhc, were as five shillings to sixpence, 
here again young Oxford had the advantage. But the 
contest was ruinous to the principles of the stables con- 
nected with the mails. This whole corporation was 
constantly bribed, rebribed, and often surrebribed; a 
mail-coach yard was like the hustings in a contested 
election ; and a horse-keeper, ostler, or helper, was held 
by the philosophical at that time to be the most corrupt 
character in the nation. 

8. There was an impression upon the public mind, 
natural enough from the continually augmenting velocity 
of the mail, but quite erroneous, that an outside seat on 
this class of carriages was a post of danger. On the con- 
trary, I maintained that, if a man had become nervous 
from some gipsy prediction in his childhood, allocating 
to a particular moon now approaching some unknown 



58 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

danger, and he should inquire earnestly, " Whither can I 
fly for shelter ? Is a prison the safest retreat ? or a luna- 
tic hospital? or the British Museum?" I should have 
repHed, " Oh no ; I'll tell you what to do. Take lodg- 
ings for the next forty days on the box of his Majesty's 
mail. Nobody can touch you there. If it is by bills at 
ninety days after date that you are made unhappy — if 
noters and protesters ° are the sort of wretches whose 
astrological shadows ° darken the house of life ° — then 
note'you what I vehemently protest : viz., that, no mat- 
ter though the sheriff and under-sheriff in every county 
should be running after you with his posse, touch a hair 
of your head he cannot whilst you keep house and have 
your legal domicile on the box of the mail. It is felony 
to stop the mail ; even the sheriff cannot do that. And 
an ex^ra touch of the whip to the leaders (no great matter 
if it grazes the sheriff) at any time guarantees your safety." 
In fact, a bedroom in a quiet house seems a safe enough 
retreat ; yet it is liable to its own notorious nuisances — 
to robbers by night, to rats, to fire. But the mail laughs 
at these errors. To robbers, the answer is packed up 
and ready for delivery in the barrel of the guard's blun- 
derbuss. Rats again ! there are none about mail-coaches 
any more than snakes in Von Troll's ° Iceland^; except, 
indeed, now and then a parliamentary rat, who always 
hides his shame in what I have shown to be the" coal-cellar." 
And, as to fire, I never knew but one in a mail-coach ; 

^"Von TroiVs Iceland": — The allusion is to a well-known chapter 
in Von Troil's work, entitled, " Concerning the Snakes of Iceland." 
The entire chapter consists of these six words — ''There are no snakes in 
Iceland." 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 59 

which was in the Exeter mail, and caused by an obstinate 
sailor bound to Devonport. Jack, making light of the 
law and the lawgiver that had set their faces against his 
offence, insisted on taking up a forbidden seat ^ in the 
rear of the roof, from which he could exchange his own 
yarns with those of the guard. No greater offence was 
then known to mail-coaches ; it was treason, it was l(zsa 
majestas° it was by tendency arson ; and the ashes of 
Jack's pipe, falling amongst the straw of the hinder boot, 
containing the mail-bags, raised a flame which (aided by 
the wind of our motion) threatened a revolution in the 
republic of letters. Yet even this left the sanctity of the 
box unviolated. In dignified repose, the coachman and 
myself sat on, resting with benign composure upon our 
knowledge that the fire would have to burn its way through 

1 " Forbidden seat" : — The very sternest code of rules was enforced 
upon the mails by the Post-office, Throughout England, only three 
ciitsides were allowed, of whom one was to sit on the box, and the 
other two immediately behind the box ; none, under any pretext, to 
come near the guard ; an indispensable caution ; since else, under the 
guise of a passenger, a robber might by any one of a thousand advan- 
tages — which sometimes are created, but always are favoured, by the 
animation of frank social intercourse — have disarmed the guard . 
Beyond the Scottish border, the regulation was so far relaxed as to 
allow oi four outsides, but not relaxed at all as to the mode of plac- 
ing them. One, as before, was seated on the box, and the other 
three on the front of the roof, with a determinate and ample separation 
from the little insulated chair of the guard. This relaxation was con- 
ceded by way of compensating to Scotland her disadvantages in point 
of population. England, by the superior density of her population, 
might always count upon a large fund of profits in the fractional trips of 
chance passengers riding for short distances of two or three stages. In 
Scotland this chance counted for much less. And therefore, to make 
good the deficiency, Scotland was allowed a compensatory profit upon 
one extra passenger. 



60 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

four inside passengers before it could reach ourselves. I 
remarked to the coachman, with a quotation from Virgil's 
"^neid " really too hackneyed — 

" Jam proximus ardet 
Ucalegon." 

But, recollecting that the Virgilian part of the coachman's 
education might have been neglected, I interpreted so far 
as to say that perhaps at that moment the flames were 
catching hold of our worthy brother and inside passenger, 
Ucalegon. The coachman made no answer, — which is 
my own way when a stranger addresses me either in Syriac 
or in Coptic ; but by his faint sceptical smile he seemed 
to insinuate that he knew better, — for that Ucalegon, as 
it happened, was not in the way-bill, and therefore could 
not have booked. 

9. No dignity is perfect which does not at some point 
ally itself with the mysterious. The connexion of the 
mail with the state and the executive government — a 
connexion obvious, but yet not strictly defined — gave to 
the whole mail establishment an official grandeur which 
did us service on the roads, and invested us with season- 
able terrors. Not the less impressive were those terrors 
because their legal limits were imperfectly ascertained. 
Look at those turnpike gates : with what deferential 
hurry, with what an obedient start, they fly open at our 
approach ! Look at that long line of carts and carters 
ahead, audaciously usurping the very crest of the road. 
Ah ! traitors, they do not hear us as yet ; but, as soon as 
the dreadful blast of our horn reaches them with proc- 
lamation of our approach, see with what frenzy of 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 6 1 

trepidation they fly to their horses' heads, and deprecate 
our wrath by the precipitation of their crane-neck quarter- 
ings. Treason they feel to be their crime ; each individual 
carter feels himself under the ban of confiscation and 
attainder ; his blood is attainted through six generations ; 
and nothing is wanting but the headsman and his axe, 
the block and the sawdust, to close up the vista of his 
horrors. What ! shall it be within benefit of clergy° to delay 
the king's message on the high road? — to interrupt the 
great respirations, ebb and flood, systole and diastole^ of 
the national intercourse? — to endanger the safety of 
tidings running day and night between all nations and 
languages ? Or can it be fancied, amongst the weakest 
of men, that the bodies of the criminals will be given up 
to their widows for Christian burial? Now, the doubts 
which were raised as to our powers did more to wrap 
them in terror, by wrapping them in uncertainty, than 
could have been efl'ected by the sharpest definitions of 
the law from the Quarter Sessions. We, on our parts (we, 
the collective mail, I mean), did our utmost to exalt the 
idea of our privileges by the insolence with which we 
wielded them. Whether this insolence rested upon law 
that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious power that 
haughtily dispensed with that sanction, equally it spoke 
from a potential station ; and the agent, in each particular 
insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, as 
one having authority. 

10. Sometimes after breakfast his Majesty's mail would 
become frisky ; and, in its difficult wheelings amongst the 
intricacies of early markets, it would upset an apple-cart, 
a cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was the affliction 



62 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

and dismay, awful was the smash. I, as far as possible, 
endeavoured in such a case to represent the conscience 
and moral sensibilities of the mail ; and, when wildernesses 
of eggs were lying poached under our horses' hoofs, then 
would I stretch forth my hands in sorrow, saying (in words 
too celebrated at that time, from the false echoes^ of 
Marengo), " Ah ! wherefore have we not time to weep over 
you?" — which was evidently impossible, since, in fact, 
we had not time to laugh over them. Tied to post-office 
allowance, in some cases of fifty minutes for eleven miles, 
could the royal mail pretend to undertake the offices of 
sympathy and condolence? Could it be expected to 
provide tears for the accidents of the road? If even it 
seemed to trample on humanity, it did so, I felt, in dis- 
charge of its own more peremptory duties. 

11. Upholding the morality of the mail, a fortiori"^ I 
upheld its rights ; as a matter of duty, I stretched to the 
uttermost its privilege of imperial precedency, and 
astonished weak minds by the feudal powers which I 
hinted to be lurking constructively in the charters of this 
proud establishment. Once I remember being on the 
box of the Holyhead mail, between Shrewsbury and 
Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some 
"Tallyho" or "Highflyer," all flaunting with green and 
gold, came up alongside of us. What a contrast to our 
royal simplicity of form and colour in this plebeian wretch ! 

'^" False echoes": — Yes, false! for the words ascribed to Napoleon, 
as breathed to the memory of Desaix, never were uttered at all. They 
stand in the same category of theatrical fictions as the cry of the 
foundering line-of-battle ship Vengeur, as the vaunt of General Cam- 
bronne at Waterloo, " La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas," or as the 
repartees of Talleyrand. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 63 

The single ornament on our dark ground of chocolate 
colour was the mighty shield of the imperial arms, but 
emblazoned in proportions as modest as a signet-ring 
bears to a seal of office. Even this was displayed only 
on a single panel, whispering, rather than proclaiming, 
our relations to the mighty state ; whilst the beast from 
Birmingham, our green-and-gold friend from false, 
fleeting, perjured Brummagem,° had as much writing and 
painting on its sprawling flanks as would have puzzled a 
decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For some time 
this Birmingham machine ran along by our side — a piece 
of familiarity that already of itself seemed to me sufficiently 
jacobinicaL° But all at once a movement of the horses 
announced a desperate intention of leaving us behind. 
"Do you see that?'' I said to the coachman. — "I 
see," was his short answer. He was wide awake, — yet 
he waited longer than seemed prudent ; for the horses of 
our audacious opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness 
and power. But his motive was loyal ; his wish was that 
the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown before he 
froze it. When that seemed right, he unloosed, or, to 
speak by a stronger word, he sprang, his known resources : 
he slipped our royal horses like cheetahs, or hunting- 
leopards, after the aff"righted game. How they could 
retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work they 
had accomplished seemed hard to explain. But on our 
side, besides the physical superiority, was a tower of 
moral strength, namely the king's name, "which they 
upon the adverse faction wanted." Passing them without 
an effort, as it seemed, we threw them into the rear with 
so lengthening an interval between us as proved in itself 



64 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

the bitterest mockery of their presumption ; whilst our 
guard blew back a shattering blast of triumph that was 
really too painfully full of derision. 

12. I mention this little incident for its connexion 
with what followed. A Welsh rustic, sitting behind me, 
asked if I had not felt my heart burn within me during 
the progress of the race? I said, with philosophic calm- 
ness, No ; because we were not racing with a mail, so that 
no glory could be gained. In fact, it was sufficiently 
mortifying that such a Birmingham thing should dare to 
challenge us. The Welshman repHed that he didn't see 
that; for that a cat might look at a king, and a Brummagem 
coach might lawfully race the Holyhead mail. " Race 
us, if you like, " I replied, " though even that has an air 
of sedition; but not beat us. This would have been 
treason ; and for its own sake I am glad that the ' Tallyho ' 
was disappointed." So dissatisfied did the Welshman 
seem with this opinion that at last I was obliged to tell 
him a very fine story from one of our elder dramatists : 
viz., that once, in some far Oriental kingdom, when the 
sultan of all the land, with his princes, ladies, and chief 
omrahs, were flying their falcons, a hawk suddenly flew 
at a majestic eagle, and, in defiance of the eagle's natural 
advantages, in contempt also of the eagle's traditional 
royalty, and before the whole assembled field of 
astonished spectators from Agra and Lahore, killed the 
eagle on the spot. Amazement seized the sultan at the 
unequal contest, and burning admiration for its unparal- 
leled result. He commanded that the hawk should be 
brought before him ; he caressed the bird with enthusiasm ; 
and he ordered that, for the commemoration of his 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 65 

matchless courage, a diadem of gold and rubies should 
be solemnly placed on the hawk's head, but then that, 
immediately after this solemn coronation, the bird should be 
led off to execution, as the most vahant indeed of traitors, 
but not the less a traitor, as having dared to rise rebel- 
liously against his liege lord and anointed sovereign, the 
eagle. "Now," said I to the Welshman, "to you and me, 
as men of refined sensibilities, how painful it would have 
been that this poor Brummagem brute, the ' Tallyho,' in 
the impossible case of a victory over us, should have been 
crowned with Birmingham tinsel, with paste diamonds 
and Roman pearls, and then led off to instant execution." 
The Welshman doubted if that could be warranted by 
law. And, when I hinted of the 6th of Edward Long- 
shanks, chap. 18, for regulating the precedency of coaches, 
as being probably the statute rehed on for the capital 
punishment of such offences, he repHed drily that, if the 
attempt to pass a mail really were treasonable, it was a 
pity that the "Tallyho " appeared to have so imperfect 
an acquaintance with law. 

13. The modern modes of travelling cannot compare 
with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. 
They boast of more velocity, — not, however, as a con- 
sciousness, but as a fact of our hfeless knowledge, resting 
upon alien evidence : as, for instance, because somebody 
says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we 
are far from feeling it as a personal experience ; or upon 
the evidence of a result, as that actually we find ourselves 
in York four hours after leaving London. Apart from such 
an assertion, or such a result, I myself am little aware of 
the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed 



66 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. On 
this system the word was not magna loquimur° as upon 
railways, but vivinius. Yes, " magna vivimus " ° ; we do 
not make verbal ostentation of our grandeurs, we realise 
our grandeurs in act, and in the very experience of life. 
The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made 
doubts impossible on the question of our speed ; we heard 
our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling ; and this 
speed was not the product of bhnd insensate agencies, that 
had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery 
eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated 
nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunderbeating hoofs. 
The sensibility of the horse uttering itself in the maniac 
light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a 
movement ; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. 
But the intervening links that connected them, that 
spread the earthquake of battle into the eyeballs of the 
horse, were the heart of man and its electric thrillings — 
kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then propa- 
gating its own tumults by contagious shouts and gestures 
to the heart of his servant the horse. But now, on the 
new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have dis- 
connected man's heart from the ministers of his locomo- 
tion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power to raise an extra 
bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is broken 
up for ever ; man's imperial nature no longer sends itself 
forward through the electric sensibility of the horse ; the 
inter-agencies are gone in the mode of communication 
between the horse and his master out of which grew so 
many aspects of subhmity under accidents of mists that 
hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agi- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 67 

tated, or midnight solitudes that awed. Tidings fitted to 
convulse all nations must henceforwards travel by culi- 
nary process °j and the trumpet that once announced 
from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard 
screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the 
darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, 
has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the 
boiler. Thus have perished multiform openings for pub- 
lic expressions of interest, scenical yet natural, in great 
national tidings, — for revelations of faces and groups that 
could not offer themselves amongst the fluctuating mobs 
of a railway station. The gatherings of gazers about a 
laurelled mail had one centre, and acknowledged one sole 
interest. But the crowds attending at a railway station 
have as little unity as running water, and own as many 
centres as there are separate carriages in the train. 

14. How else, for example, than as a constant watcher 
for the dawn, and for the London mail that in summer 
months entered about daybreak amongst the lawny thick- 
ets of Marlborough forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny 
of the Bath road, have become the glorified inmate of 
my dreams ? Yet Fanny, as the loveliest young woman for 
face and person that perhaps in my whole life I have be- 
held, merited the station which even now, from a distance 
of forty years, she holds in my dreams ; yes, though by links 
of natural association she brings along with her a troop of 
dreadful creatures, fabulous and not fabulous, that are 
more abominable to the heart than Fanny and the dawn 
are delightful. 

15. Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived 
at a mile's distance from that road, but came so continually 



6S THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

to meet the mail that I on my frequent transits rarely 
missed her, and naturally connected her image with the 
great thoroughfare where only I had ever seen her. Why 
she came so punctually I do not exactly know ; but I 
beUeve with some burden of commissions, to be executed 
in Bath, which had gathered to her own residence as a 
central rendezvous for converging them. The mail-coach- 
man who drove the Bath mail and wore the royal livery ^ 
happened to be Fanny's grandfather. A good man he 
was, that loved his beautiful granddaughter, and, loving 
her wisely, was vigilant over her deportment in any case 
where young Oxford might happen to be concerned. Did 
my vanity then suggest that I myself, individually, could 
fall within the line of his terrors? Certainly not, as re- 
garded any physical pretensions that I could plead ; for 
Fanny (as a chance passenger from her own neighbourhood 
once told me) counted in her train a hundred and ninety- 
nine professed admirers, if not open aspirants to her 
favour ; and probably not one of the whole brigade but 
excelled myself in personal advantages. Ulysses even, 
with the unfair advantage of his accursed bow, could 
hardly have undertaken that amount of suitors. So the 
danger might have seemed slight — only that woman is 
universally aristocratic ; it is amongst her nobilities of 

1" IVore the royal livery": — The general impression was that the 
royal livery belonged of right to the mail-coachmen as their professional 
dress. But that was an error. To the guard it did belong, I believe, 
and was obviously essential as an official warrant, and as a means of in- 
stant identification for his person, in the discharge of his important 
public duties. But the coachman, and especially if his place in the 
series did not connect him immediately with London and the General 
Post-Office, obtained the scarlet coat only as an honorary distinction 
after long (or, if not long, trying and special) service. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 69 

heart that she is so. Now, the aristocratic distinctions in 
my favour might easily with Miss Fanny have compensated 
my physical deficiencies. Did I then make love to Fanny ? 
Why, yes ; about as much love as one could make whilst 
the mail was changing horses — a process which, ten years 
later, did not occupy above eighty seconds ; but then, — 
viz., about Waterloo — it occupied five times eighty. 
Now, four hundred seconds offer a field quite ample enough 
for whispering into a young woman's ear a great deal of 
truth, and (by way of parenthesis) some trifle of falsehood. 
Grandpapa did right, therefore, to watch me. And yet, 
as happens too often to the grandpapas of earth in a con- 
test with the admirers of granddaughters, how vainly would 
he have watched me had I meditated any evil whispers 
to Fanny ! She, it is my behef, would have protected her- 
self against any man's evil suggestions. But he, as the 
result showed, could not have intercepted the opportunities 
for such suggestions. Yet, why not ? Was he not active ? 
Was he not blooming? Blooming he was as Fanny her- 
self. 

" Say, all our praises ° why should lords " 

Stop, that's not the line. 

" Say, all our roses why should girls engross? " 

The coachman showed rosy blossoms on his face deeper 
even than his granddaughter's — his being drawn from 
the ale-cask, Fanny's from the fountains of the dawn. But, 
in spite of his blooming face, some infirmities he had ; and 
one particularly in which he too much resembled a croco- 
dile. This lay in a monstrous inaptitude for turning 



70 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

round. The crocodile, I presume, owes that inaptitude 
to the absurd length of his back ; but in our girandpapa it 
arose rather from the absurd breadth of his back, com- 
bined, possibly, with some growing stiffness in his legs. 
Now, upon this crocodile infirmity of his I planted a human 
advantage for tendering my homage to Miss Fanny. In 
defiance of all his honourable vigilance, no sooner had he 
presented to us his mighty Jovian back (what a field for 
displaying to mankind his royal scarlet !), whilst inspecting 
professionally the buckles, the straps, and the silvery tur- 
rets ^ of his harness, than I raised Miss Fanny's hand to my 
lips, and, by the mixed tenderness and respectfulness of 
my manner, caused her easily to understand how happy it 
would make me to rank upon her hst as No. loor 12 : in 
which case a few casualties among her lovers (and, ob- 
serve, they hanged liberally in those days) might have 
promoted me speedily to the top of the tree ; as, on the 
other hand, with how much loyalty of submission I ac- 
quiesced by anticipation in her award, supposing that she 
should plant me in the very rearward of her favour, as No. 
199 + I. Most truly I loved this beautiful and ingenuous 
girl \ and, had it not been for the Bath mail, timing all 
courtships by post-office allowance, heaven only knows 
what might have come of it. People talk of being over 
head and ears in love ; now, the mail was the cause that I 

'^''Turrets": — As one who loves and venerates Chaucer for his un- 
rivalled merits of tenderness, of picturesque characterisation, and of 
narrative skill, I noticed with great pleasure that the word torrefies is 
used by him to designate the little devices through which the reins are 
made to pass. This same word, in the same exact sense, I heard uniformly- 
used by many scores of illustrious mail-coachmen to whose confidential 
friendship I had the honour of being admitted in my younger days. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 71 

sank only over ears in love, — which, you know, still left 
a trifle of brain to overlook the whole conduct of the affair. 
16. Ah, reader ! when I look back upon those days, it 
seems to me that all things change — all things perish. 
" Perish the roses and the palms of kings " : perish even 
the crowns and trophies of Waterloo : thunder and hght- 
ning are not the thunder and hghtning which I remember. 
Roses are degenerating. The Fannies of our island — 
though this I say with reluctance — are not visibly improv- 
ing; and the Bath road is notoriously superannuated. 
Crocodiles, you will say, are stationary. Mr. Waterton tells 
me that the crocodile does no^cha.nge, — that a cayman,° 
in fact, or an alligator, is just as good for riding upon as 
he was in the time of the Pharaohs. T/ia^ may be ; but 
the reason is that the crocodile does not live fast — he is 
a slow coach. I believe it is generally understood among 
naturalists that the crocodile is a blockhead. It is my 
own impression that the Pharaohs were also blockheads. 
Now, as the Pharaohs and the crocodile domineered over 
Egyptian society, this accounts for a singular mistake that 
prevailed through innumerable generations on the Nile. 
The crocodile made the ridiculous blunder of supposing 
man to be meant chiefly for his own eating. Man, taking 
a different view of the subject, naturafly met that mis- 
take by another : he viewed the crocodile as a thing some- 
times to worship, but always to run away from. And this 
continued till Mr. Waterton^ changed the relations be- 

i"A/r. Waterton": — Had the reader lived through the last genera- 
tion, he would not need to be told that, some thirty or thirty-five years 
back, Mr. Waterton, a distinguished country gentleman of ancient fam- 
ily in Northumberland, publicly mounted and rode in top-boots a sav- 



72 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

tween the animals. The mode of escaping from the rep- 
tile he showed to be not by running away, but by leaping 
on its back booted and spurred. The two animals had 
misunderstood each other. The use of the crocodile has 
now been cleared up — viz., to be ridden ; and the final 
cause of man is that he may improve the health of the croco- 
dile by riding him a-fox-hunting before breakfast. And 
it is pretty certain that any crocodile who has been regu- 
larly hunted through the season, and is master of the 
weight he carries, will take a six-barred gate now as well 
as ever he would have done in the infancy of the pyramids. 
17. If, therefore, the crocodile does not change, all 
things else undeniably do: even the shadow of the 
pyramids grows less. And often the restoration in vision 
of Fanny and the Bath road makes me too pathetically 
sensible of that truth. Out of the darkness, if I happen 
to call back the image of Fanny, up rises suddenly from 
a gulf of forty years a rose in June ; or, if I think for an 
instant of the rose in June, up rises the heavenly face of 
Fanny. One after the other, like the antiphonies in the 
choral service, rise Fanny and the rose in June, then 
back again the rose in June and Fanny. Then come 
both together, as in a chorus — roses and Fannies, 
Fannies and roses, without end, thick as blossoms in 
paradise. Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal 
livery of scarlet and gold, with sixteen capes ; and the 

age old crocodile, that was restive and very impertinent, but all to no 
purpose. The crocodile jibbed and tried to kick, but vainly. He was 
no more able to throw the squire than Sinbad was to throw the old 
scoundrel who used his back without paying for it, until he discovered 
a mode (slightly immoral, perhaps, though some think not) of murder- 
ing the old fraudulent jockey, and so circuitously of unhorsing him. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 73 

crocodile is driving four-in-hand from the box of the 
Bath mail. And suddenly we upon the mail are pulled 
up by a mighty dial, sculptured with the hours, that 
mingle with the heavens and the heavenly host. Then 
all at once we are arrived at Marlborough forest, amongst 
the lovely households ^ of the roe-deer ; the deer and 
their fawns retire into the dewy thickets ; the thickets 
are rich with roses ; once again the roses call up the 
sweet countenance of Fanny ; and she, being the grand- 
daughter of a crocodile, awakens a dreadful host of semi- 
legendary animals — griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes 
— till at length the whole vision of fighting images 
crowds into one towering armorial shield, a vast em- 
blazonry of human charities and human loveliness that 
have perished, but quartered heraldically with unutterable 
and demoniac natures, whilst over all rises, as a sur- 
mounting crest, one fair female hand, with the forefinger 
pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to 
heaven, where is sculptured the eternal writing which 
proclaims the frailty of earth and her children. 

Going Down With Victory 

18. But the grandest chapter of our experience within 
the whole mail-coach service was on those occasions 
when we went down from London with the news of 

'^'■'Households" : — Roe-deer do not congregate in herds like the 
fallow or the red deer, but by separate families, parents and children; 
which feature of approximation to the sanctity of human hearths, added 
to their comparatively miniature and graceful proportions, conciliates 
to them an interest of peculiar tenderness, supposing even that this 
beautiful creature is less characteristically impressed with the grandeurs 
of savage and forest life. 



74 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

victory. A period of about ten years stretched from 
Trafalgar to Waterloo; the second and third years of 
which period (1806 and 1807) were comparatively sterile ; 
but the other nine (from 1805 to 18 15 inclusively) fur- 
nished a long succession of victories, the least of which, in 
such a contest of Titans, had an inappreciable value of 
position : partly for its absolute interference with the 
plans of our enemy, but still more from its keeping alive 
through central Europe the sense of a deep-seated vul- 
nerability in France. Even to tease the coasts of our 
enemy, to mortify them by continual blockades, to insult 
them by capturing if it were but a baubling schooner 
under the eyes of their arrogant armies, repeated from 
time to time a sullen proclamation of power lodged in 
one quarter to which the hopes of Christendom turned 
in secret. How much more loudly must this proclama- 
tion have spoken in the audacity^ of having bearded the 
elite of their troops, and having beaten them in pitched 
battles ! Five years of life it was worth paying down for 
the privilege of an outside place on a mail-coach, when 

'^"Audacity" : — Such the French accounted it; and it has struck 
me that Soult would not have been so popular in London, at the period 
of her present Majesty's coronation, or in Manchester, on occasion of 
his visit to that town, if they had been aware of the insolence with which 
he spoke of us in notes written at intervals from the field of Waterloo. 
As though it had been mere felony in our array to look a French one 
in the face, he said in more notes than one, dated from two to four P.M. 
on the field of Waterloo, " Here are the English — we have them ; they 
are caught en fiagrant delit." Yet no man should have known us better ; 
no man had drunk deeper from the cup of humiliation than Soult had 
in 1809, when ejected by us with headlong violence from Oporto, and 
pursued through a long line of wrecks to the frontier of Spain ; and 
subsequently at Albuera, in the bloodiest of recorded battles, to say 
nothing of Toulouse, he should have learned our pretensions. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 75 

carrying down the first tidings of any such event. And 
it is to be noted that, from our insular situation, and the 
multitude of our frigates disposable for the rapid trans- 
mission of intelligence, rarely did any unauthorised 
rumour steal away a prelibation from the first aroma of 
the regular despatches. The government news was gen- 
erally the earliest news. 

19. From eight p.m. to fifteen or twenty minutes later 
imagine the mails assembled on parade in Lombard 
Street ; where, at that time,^ and not in St. Martin's-le- 
Grand, was seated the General Post-Office. In what 
exact strength we mustered I do not remember ; but, 
from the length of each separate attelage° we filled the 
street, though a long one, and though we were drawn up 
in double file. On any night the spectacle was beauti- 
ful. The absolute perfection of all the appointments 
about the carriages and the harness, their strength, their 
briUiant cleanliness, their beautiful simplicity — but, more 
than all, the royal magnificence of the horses — were 
what might first have fixed the attention. Every carriage 
on every morning in the year was taken down to an 
official inspector for examination : wheels, axles, linch- 
pins, pole, glasses, lamps, were all critically probed and 
tested. Every part of every carriage had been cleaned, 
every horse had been groomed, with as much rigour as if 
they belonged to a private gentleman ; and that part of 
the spectacle offered itself always. But the night before 
us is a night of victory ; and, behold ! to the ordinary dis- 
play what a heart-shaking addition ! — horses, men, car- 
riages, all are dressed in laurels and flowers, oak-leaves 
1 "At that time ": — I speak of the era previous to Waterloo. 



^6 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

and ribbons. The guards, as being officially his Majesty's 
servants, and of the coachmen such as are within the 
privilege of the post-office, wear the royal liveries of 
course ; and, as it is summer (for all the /and victories 
were naturally won in summer), they wear, on this fine 
evening, these liveries exposed to view, without any 
covering of upper coats. Such a costume, and the 
elaborate arrangement of the laurels in their hats, dilate 
their hearts, by giving to them openly a personal connex- 
ion with the great news in which already they have the 
general interest of patriotism. That great national senti- 
ment surmounts and quells all sense of ordinary distinc- 
tions. Those passengers who happen to be gentlemen 
are now hardly to be distinguished as such except by 
dress ; for the usual reserve of their manner in speak- 
ing to the attendants has on this night melted away. 
One heart, one pride, one glory, connects every man . by 
the transcendent bond of his national blood. The spec- 
tators, who are numerous beyond precedent, express 
their sympathy with these fervent feelings by continual 
hurrahs. Every moment are shouted aloud by the post- 
office servants, and summoned to draw up, the great 
ancestral names of cities known to history through a 
thousand years — Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, 
Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, 
Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, Aberdeen — express- 
ing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its 
towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by the 
diffusive radiation of its separate missions. Every mo- 
ment you hear the thunder of lids locked down upon the 
mail-bags. That sound to each individual mail is the 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH yj 

signal for drawing off; which process is the finest part 
of the entire spectacle. Then come the horses into play. 
Horses ! can these be horses that bound off with the 
action and gestures of leopards ? What stir ! — what sea- 
like ferment ! — what a thundering of wheels ! — what a 
trampling of hoofs ! — what a sounding of trumpets ! — 
what farewell cheers — what redoubling peals of brotherly 
congratulation, connecting the name of the particular 
mail — " Liverpool forever ! " — with the name of the 
particular victory — " Badajoz forever ! " or "Salamanca 
forever ! " The half-slumbering consciousness that all- 
night long, and all the next day — perhaps for even a 
longer period — many of these mails, like fire racing 
along a train of gunpowder, will be kindling at every in- 
stant new successions of burning joy, has an obscure 
effect of multiplying the victory itself, by multiplying to 
the imagination into infinity the stages of its progressive 
diffusion. A fiery arrow seems to be let loose, which 
from that moment is destined to travel, without intermis- 
sion, westwards for three hundred ^ miles — northwards 
for six hundred; and the sympathy of our Lombard 
Street friends at parting is exalted a hundredfold by a 
sort of visionary sympathy with the yet slumbering sym- 
pathies which in so vast a succession we are going to 
awake. 

1 " Three hundred" : — Oi necessity, this scale of measurement, to an 
American, if he happens to.be a thoughtless man, must sound ludicrous. 
Accordingly, I remember a case in which an American writer indulges 
himself in the luxury of a little fibbing, by ascribing to an Englishman 
a pompous account of the Thames, constructed entirely upon American 
ideas of grandeur, and concluding in something like these terms : — 
" And, sir, arriving at London, this mighty father of rivers attains a 



^8 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

20. Liberated from the embarrassments of the city, and 
issuing into the broad uncrowded avenues of the northern 
suburbs, we soon begin to enter upon our natural pace 
of ten miles an hour. In the broad light of the summer 
evening, the sun, perhaps, only just at the point of setting, 
we are seen from every storey of every house. Heads of 
every age crowd to the windows ; young and old under- 
stand the language of our victorious symbols ; and rolling 
volleys of sympathising cheers run along us, behind us, and 
before us. The beggar, rearing himself against the wall, 

breadth of at least two furlongs, having, in its winding course traversed 
the astonishing distance of one hundred and seventy miles." And 
this the candid American thinks it fair to contrast with the scale of 
the Mississippi. Now, it is hardly worth while to answer a pure fiction 
gravely; else one might say that no Englishman out of Bedlam ever 
thought of looking in an island for the rivers of a continent, nor, con- 
sequently, could have thought of looking for the peculiar grandeur of 
the Thames in the length of its course, or in the extent of soil which it 
drains. Yet, if he kad been so absurd, the American might have 
recollected that a river, not to be compared with the Thames even as 
to volume of water — viz. the Tiber — has contrived to make itself 
heard of in this world for twenty-five centuries to an extent not reached 
as yet by any river, however corpulent, of his own land. The glory of 
the Thames is measured by the density of the population to which it 
ministers, by the commerce which it supports, by the grandeur of the 
empire in which, though far from the largest, it is the most influential 
stream. Upon some such scale, and not by a transfer of Columbian 
standards, is the course of our English mails to be valued. The 
American may fancy the effect of his own valuations to our English 
ears by supposing the case of a Siberian glorifying his country in 
these terms : — " These v^Tetches, sir, in France and England, cannot 
march half a mile in any direction without finding a house where food 
can be had and lodging ; whereas such is the noble desolation of our mag- 
nificent country that in many a direction for a thousand miles I will en- 
gage that a dog shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a wren 
find an apology for breakfast." 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 79 

forgets his lameness — real or assumed — thinks not 
of his whining trade, but stands erect, with bold exult- 
ing smiles, as we pass him. The victory has healed 
him, and says, Be thou whole ! Women and children, 
from garrets alike and cellars, through infinite London, 
look down or look up with loving eyes upon our gay rib- 
bons and our martial laurels; sometimes kiss their 
hands ; sometimes hang out, as signals of affection, 
pocket-handkerchiefs, aprons, dusters, anything that, by 
catching the summer breezes, will express an aerial jubi- 
lation. On the London side of Barnet,° to which we 
draw near within a few minutes after nine, observe that 
private carriage which is approaching us. The weather 
being so warm, the glasses are all down ; and one may 
read, as on the stage of a theatre, everything that goes on 
within. It contains three ladies — one Hkely to be 
" mamma," and two of seventeen or eighteen, who are proba- 
bly her daughters. What lovely animation, what beautiful 
unpremeditated pantomime, explaining to us every sylla- 
ble that passes, in these ingenuous girls ! By the sudden 
start and raising of the hands on first discovering our 
laurelled equipage, by the sudden movement and appeal 
to the elder lady from both of them, and by the 
heightened colour on their animated countenances, we 
can almost hear them saying, " See, see ! Look at their 
laurels ! Oh, mamma ! there has been a great battle in 
Spain ; and it has been a great victory." In a moment we are 
on the point of passing them. We passengers — I on the 
box, and the two on the roof behind me — raise our hats to 
the ladies ; the coachman makes his professional salute 
with the whip ; the guard even, though punctilious on 



80 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

the matter of his dignity as an officer under the crown, 
touches his hat. The ladies move to us, in return, with a 
winning graciousness of gesture ; all smile on each side 
in a way that nobody could misunderstand, and that 
nothing short of a grand national sympathy could so in- 
stantaneously prompt. Will these ladies say that we 
are nothing to them? Oh no ; they will not say that. 
They cannot deny — they do not deny — that for this 
night they are our sisters ; gentle or simple, scholar or 
illiterate servant, for twelve hours to come, we on the 
outside have the honour to be their brothers. Those 
poor women, again, who stop to gaze upon us with de- 
hght at the entrance of Barnet, and seem, by their air 
of weariness, to be returning from labour — do you 
mean to say that they are washerwomen and charwomen°? 
Oh, my poor friend, you are quite mistaken. I assure 
you they stand in a far higher rank ; for this one night 
they feel themselves by birthright to be daughters of 
England, and answer to no humbler title. 

21. Every joy, however, even rapturous joy — such is the 
sad law of earth — may carry with it grief, or fear of grief, 
to some. Three miles beyond Barnet, we see approach- 
ing us another private carriage, nearly repeating the 
circumstances of the former case. Here, also, the glasses 
are all down : here, also, is an elderly lady seated ] but 
the two daughters are missing : for the single young per- 
son sitting by the lady's side seems to be an attendant — 
so I judge from her dress, and her air of respectful reserve. 
The lady is in mourning ; and her countenance expresses 
sorrow. At first she does not look up ; so that I beheve 
she is not aware of our approach, until she hears the 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 8 1 

measured beating of our horses' hoofs. Then she raises 
her eyes to settle them painfully on our triumphal equipage. 
Our decorations explain the case to her at once ; but she 
beholds them with apparent anxiety, or even with terror. 
Some time before this, I, finding it difficult to hit a flying 
mark when embarrassed by the coachman's person and 
reins intervening, had given to the guard a " Courier " 
evening paper, containing the gazette," for the next 
carriage that might pass. Accordingly he tossed it in, so 
folded that the huge capitals expressing some such legend 
as GLORIOUS VICTORY might catch the eye at once. To 
see the paper, however, at all, interpreted as it was by 
our ensigns of triumph, explained everything; and, if the 
guard were right in thinking the lady to have received it 
with a gesture of horror, it could not be doubtful that she 
had suffered some deep personal affliction in connexion 
with this Spanish war. 

22. Here, now, was the case of one who, having formerly 
suffered, might, erroneously perhaps, be distressing her- 
self with anticipations of another similar suffering. That 
same night, and hardly three hours later, occurred the re- 
verse case. A poor woman, who too probably would find 
herself, in a day or two, to have suffered the heaviest of afflic- 
tions by the battle, blindly allowed herself to express an ex- 
ultation so unmeasured in the news and its details as gave 
to her the appearance which amongst Celtic Highlanders is 
ca.\\ed/ey.° This was at some little town where we changed 
horses an hour or two after midnight. Some fair or wake 
had kept the people up out of their beds, and had 
occasioned a partial illumination of the stalls and booths, 
presenting an unusual but very impressive effect. We 



82 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

saw many lights moving about as we drew near ; and per- 
haps the most striking scene on the whole route was our 
reception at this place. The flashing of torches and the 
beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically, Bengal lights) 
upon the heads of our horses ; the fine effect of such a 
showery and ghostly illumination faUing upon our flowers 
and glittering laurels^; whilst all around ourselves, that 
formed a centre of light, the darkness gathered on the 
rear and flanks in massy blackness : these optical splen- 
dours, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the 
people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting, 
theatrical and holy. As we staid for three or four minutes, 
I alighted ; and immediately from a dismantled stall in 
the street, where no doubt she had been presiding through 
the earlier part of the night, advanced eagerly a middle- 
aged woman. The sight of my newspaper it was that had 
drawn her attention upon myself. The victory which we 
were carrying down to the provinces on this occasion was 
the imperfect one of Talavera° — imperfect for its results, 
such was the virtual treachery of the Spanish general, 
Cuesta, but not imperfect in its ever-memorable heroism. 
I told her the main outHne of the battle. The agitation 
of her enthusiasm had been so conspicuous when listening, 
and when first applying for information, that I could not 
but ask her if she had not some relative in the Peninsular 
army. Oh yes ; her only son was there. In what regi- 
ment? He was a trooper in the 23d Dragoons. My 
heart sank within me as she made that answer. This 

"^"Glittering laurels":— I must observe that the colour of green 
suffers almost a spiritual change and exaltation under the effect of 
Bengal lights. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 8$ 

sublime regiment, which an Englishman should never men- 
tion without raising his hat to their memory, had made 
the most memorable and effective charge recorded in 
military annals. They leaped their horses — over sl trench 
where they could ; in/o it, and with the result of death 
or mutilation, when they could noL What proportion 
cleared the trench is nowhere stated. Those who di^/ 
closed up and went down upon the enemy with such 
divinity of fervour (I use the word divinity by design : 
the inspiration of God must have prompted this movement 
for those whom even then He was calHng to His presence) 
that two results followed. As regarded the enemy, this 
23d Dragoons, not, I believe, originally three hundred and 
fifty strong, paralysed a French column six thousand 
strong, then ascended the hill, and fixed the gaze of the 
whole French army. As regarded themselves, the 23d 
were supposed at first to have been barely not annihilated ; 
but eventually, I believe, about one in four survived. And 
this, then, was the regiment — a regiment already for 
some hours glorified and hallowed to the ear of all London, 
as lying stretched, by a large majority, upon one bloody 
aceldama ° — in which the young trooper served whose 
mother was now talking in a spirit of such joyous en- 
thusiasm. Did I tell her the truth? Had I the heart 
to break up her dreams? No. To-morrow, said I to 
myself — to-morrow, or the next day, will publish the 
worst. For one night more wherefore should she not 
sleep in peace? After to-morrow the chances are too 
many that peace will forsake her pillow. This brief res- 
pite, then, let her owe to my gift and my forbearance. 
But, if I told her not of the bloody price that had been 



84 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

paid, not therefore was I silent on the contributions from 
her son's regiment to that day's service and glory. I 
showed her not the funeral banners under which the noble 
regiment was sleeping. I lifted not the overshadowing 
laurels from the bloody trench in which horse and rider 
lay mangled together. But I told her how these dear 
children of England, officers and privates, had leaped their 
horses over all obstacles as gaily as hunters to the morn- 
ing's chase. I told her how they rode their horses into 
the midst of death, — saying to myself, but not saying to 
her, " and laid down their young lives for thee, O mother 
England ! as willingly — poured out their noble blood as 
cheerfully — as ever, after a long day's sport, when infants, 
they had rested their weary heads upon their mother's 
knees, or had sunk to sleep in her arms." Strange it is, 
yet true, that she seemed to have no fears for her son's 
safety, even after this knowledge that the 23d Dragoons 
had been memorably engaged ; but so much was she en- 
raptured by the knowledge that his regiment, and there- 
fore that he, had rendered conspicuous service in the 
dreadful conflict — a service which had actually made 
them, within the last twelve hours, the foremost topic of 
conversation in London — so absolutely was fear swal- 
lowed up in joy — that, in the mere simplicity of her 
fervent nature, the poor woman threw her arms round my 
neck, as she thought of her son, and gave to me the kiss 
which secretly was meant for hi7n. 

Section the Second — The Vision of Sudden Death 

23. What is to be taken as the predominant opinion of 
man, reflective and philosophic, upon sudden death? It 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 85 

is remarkable that, in different conditions of society, sud- 
den death has been variously regarded as the consumma- 
tion ° of an earthly career most fervently to be desired, or, 
again, as that consummation which is with most horror to 
be deprecated. Caesar the Dictator, at his last dinner- 
party (ccend), on the very evening before his assassination, 
when the minutes of his earthly career were numbered, 
being asked what death, in his judgment, might be pro- 
nounced the most eligible, replied " That which should be 
most sudden." On the other hand, the divine Litany of 
our English Church, when breathing forth supplications, 
as if in some representative character, for the whole human 
race prostrate before God, places such a death in the very 
van of horrors : " From lightning and tempest ; from 
plague, pestilence, and famine ; from battle and murder, 
and from sudden death — Good Lord, deliver us. " Sud- 
den death is here made to crown the cHmax in a grand 
ascent of calamities ; it is ranked among the last of curses ; 
and yet by the noblest of Romans ° it was ranked as the first 
of blessings. In that difference most readers will see little 
more than the essential difference between Christianity 
and Paganism. But this, on consideration, I doubt. The 
Christian Church may be right in its estimate of sudden 
death ; and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may 
also be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from 
life, as that which seems most reconcilable with meditation, 
with penitential retrospects, and with the humihties of 
farewell prayer. There does not, however, occur to me 
any direct scriptural warrant for this earnest petition of 
the English Litany unless under a special construction of 
the word " sudden." It seems a petition indulged rather 



S6 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

and conceded to human infirmity than exacted from human 
piety. It is not so much a doctrine built upon the eterni- 
ties of the Christian system as a plausible opinion built 
upon special varieties of physical temperament. Let that, 
however, be as it may, two remarks suggest themselves as 
prudent restraints upon a doctrine which else may wander, 
and has wandered, into an uncharitable superstition. The 
first is this : that many people are likely to exaggerate the 
horror of a sudden death from the disposition to lay a false 
stress upon words or acts simply because by an accident 
they have become Jina/ words or acts. If a man dies, for 
instance, by some sudden death when he happens to be 
intoxicated, such a death is falsely regarded with pecuhar 
horror ; as though the intoxication were suddenly exalted 
into a blasphemy. But fkat is unphilosophic. The man 
was, or he was not, habitually a drunkard. If not, if his 
intoxication were a soHtary accident, there can be no 
reason for allowing special emphasis to this act simply be- 
cause through misfortune it became his final act. Nor, 
on the other hand, if it were no accident, but one of 
his habitual transgressions, will it be the more habitual 
or the more a transgression because some sudden calam- 
ity, surprising him, has caused this habitual transgression 
to be also a final one. Could the man have had any 
reason even dimly to foresee his own sudden death, there 
would have been a new feature in his act of intemperance 
— a feature of presumption and irreverence, as in one 
that, having known himself drawing near to the pres- 
ence of God, should have suited his demeanour to an 
expectation so awful. But this is no part of the case 
supposed. And the only new element in the man's 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 8/ 

act is not any element of special immorality, but simply 
of special misfortune. 

24. The other remark has reference to the meaning 
of the word sudden. Very possibly Caesar and the 
Christian Church do not differ in the way supposed, — ■ 
that is, do not differ by any difference of doctrine as 
between Pagan and Christian views of the moral temper 
appropriate to death ; but perhaps they are contemplating 
different cases. Both contemplate a violent death, a 
Bia^amTos° — ^ death that is /?tatos, or, in other words, 
death that is brought about, not by internal and spontaneous 
change, but by active force having its origin from without. 
In this meaning the two authorities agree. Thus far they 
are in harmony. But the difference is that the Roman by 
the word " sudden " means un lingering, whereas the Chris- 
tian Litany by " sudden death " means a death without 
warning, consequently without any available summons to 
religious preparation. The poor mutineer who kneels 
down to gather into his heart the bullets from twelve 
firelocks of his pitying comrades dies by a most sudden 
death in Caesar's sense ; one shock, one mighty spasm, 
one (possibly not one) groan, and all is over. But, in 
the sense of the Litany, the mutineer's death is far from 
sudden : his offence originally, his imprisonment, his trial, 
the interval between his sentence and its. execution, 
having all furnished him with separate warnings of his 
fate — having all summoned him to meet it with solemn 
preparation. 

25. Here at once, in this sharp verbal distinction, we 
comprehend the faithful earnestness with which a holy 
Christian Church pleads on behalf of her poor departing 



88 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

children that God would vouchsafe to them the last great 
privilege and distinction possible on a death-bed, viz., 
the opportunity of untroubled preparation for facing this 
mighty trial. Sudden death, as a mere variety in the 
modes of dying where death in some shape is inevitable, 
proposes a question of choice which, equally in the Roman 
and the Christian sense, will be variously answered accord- 
ing to each man's variety of temperament. Meantime, 
one aspect of sudden death there is, one modification, 
upon which no doubt can arise, that of all martyrdoms 
it is the most agitating — viz., where it surprises a man 
under circumstances which offer (or which seem to offer) 
some hurrying, flying, inappreciably minute chance of 
evading it.° Sudden as the danger which it affronts 
must be any effort by which such an evasion can be 
accomplished. Even f/zaf, even the sickening ne- 
cessity for hurrying in extremity where all hurry seems 
destined to be vain, — even that anguish is liable to a 
hideous exasperation in one particular case : viz., where 
the appeal is made not exclusively to the instinct of 
self-preservation, but to the conscience, on behalf of some 
other life besides your own, accidentally thrown upon 
your protection. To fail, to collapse in a service merely 
your own, might seem comparatively venial ; though, in 
fact, it is far from venial. But to fail in a case where 
Providence has suddenly thrown into your hands the 
final interests of another, — a fellow-creature shuddering 
between the gates of life and death : this, to a man of 
apprehensive conscience, would mingle the misery of an 
atrocious criminality with the misery of a bloody calamity. 
You are called upon, by the case supposed, possibly to 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 89 

die, but to die at the very moment when, by any even 
partial failure or effeminate collapse of your energies, you 
will be self- denounced as a murderer. You had but the 
twinkling of an eye for your effort, and that effort might have 
been unavailing ; but to have risen to the level of such an 
effort would have rescued you, though not from dying, 
yet from dying as a traitor to your final and farewell duty. 
26. The situation here contemplated exposes a dread- 
ful ulcer, lurking far down in the depths of human 
nature. It is not that men generally are summoned to 
face such awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy 
outline, such a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps 
all men's natures. Upon the secret mirror of our dreams 
such a trial is darkly projected, perhaps, to every one of 
us. That dream, so familiar to childhood, of meeting a 
lion, and, through languishing prostration in hope and 
the energies of hope, that constant sequel of lying down 
before the Hon pubUshes the secret frailty of human nature 
— reveals its deep-seated falsehood to itself — records its 
abysmal treachery. Perhaps not one of us escapes that 
dream ; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that 
dream repeats for every one of us, through every gen- 
eration, the original temptation in Eden. Every one of 
us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the infirm places 
of his own individual will ;. once again a snare is presented 
for tempting him into captivity to a luxury of ruin ; once 
again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man falls by his own 
choice; again, by infinite iteration, the ancient earth 
groans to Heaven, through her secret caves, over the 
weakness of her child. " Nature, from her seat,° sighing 
through all her works, " again " gives signs of woe that all 



90 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

is lost " ; and again the counter-sigh is repeated to the 
sorrowing heavens for the endless rebellion against God. 
It is not without probability that in the world of dreams 
every one of us ratifies for himself the original transgression. 
In dreams, perhaps under some secret conflict of the mid- 
night sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness at the time, 
but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, 
each several child of our mysterious race completes for 
himself the treason of the aboriginal fall. 

27. The incident, so memorable in itself by its features 
of horror, and so scenical by its grouping for the eye, 
which furnished the text for this reverie upon Sudden Death 
occurred to myself in the dead of night, as a solitary spec- 
tator, when seated on the box of the Manchester and 
Glasgow mail, in the second or third summer after 
Waterloo. I find it necessary to relate the circumstances, 
because they are such as could not have occurred unless 
under a singular combination of accidents. In those 
days, the oblique and lateral communications with many 
rural post-offices were so arranged, either through 
necessity or through defect of system, as to make it 
requisite for the main north- western mail {i.e., down mail°) 
on reaching Manchester to halt for a number of hours; 
how many, I do not remember ; six or seven, I think ; 
but the result was that, in the ordinary course, the mail 
recommenced its journey northwards about midnight. 
Wearied with the long detention at a gloomy hotel, I 
walked out about eleven o'clock at night for the sake of 
fresh air ; meaning to fall in with the mail and resume my 
seat at the post-office. The night, however, being yet 
dark, as the moon had scarcely risen, and the streets 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 91 

being at that hour empty, so as to offer no opportunities 
for asking the road, I lost my way, and did not reach the 
post-office until it was considerably past midnight ; but, 
to my great relief (as it was important for me to be in 
Westmoreland by the morning), I saw in the huge 
saucer eyes of the mail, blazing through the gloom, an 
evidence that my chance was not yet lost. Past the time 
it was j but, by some rare accident, the mail was not even 
yet ready to start. I ascended to my seat on the box, 
where my cloak was still lying as it had lain at the Bridge- 
water Arms. I had left it there in imitation of a nautical 
discoverer, who leaves a bit of bunting on the shore of 
his discovery, by way of warning off the ground the whole 
human race, and notifying to the Christian and the 
heathen worlds, with his best compliments, that he has 
hoisted his pocket-handkerchief once and for ever upon that 
virgin soil : thenceforward claiming theyV/j" dominii° to the 
top of the atmosphere above it, and also the right of driving 
shafts to the centre of the earth below it ; so that all 
people found after this warning either aloft in upper cham- 
bers of the atmosphere, or groping in subterraneous shafts, 
or squatting audaciously on the surface of the soil, will be 
treated as trespassers — kicked, that is to say, or decapi- 
tated, as circumstances may suggest, by their very faithful 
servant, the owner of the said pocket-handkerchief. In 
the present case, it is probable that my cloak might not 
have been respected, and the jus gentium ° might have 
been cruelly violated in my person — for, in the dark, 
people commit deeds of darkness, gas being a great ally 
of morality ; but it so happened that on this night there 
was no other outside passenger ; and thus the crime, which 



92 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

else was but too probable, missed fire for want of a 
criminal. 

28. Having mounted the box, I took a small quantity 
of laudanum, having already travelled two hundred and 
fifty miles — viz., from a point seventy miles beyond 
London. In the taking of laudanum there was nothing 
extraordinary. But by accident it drew upon me the 
special attention of my assessor ° on the box, the coach- 
man. And in that also there was nothing extraordinary. 
But by accident, and with great delight, it drew my own 
attention to the fact that this coachman was a monster 
in point of bulk, and. that he had but one eye. In fact, 
he had been foretold by Virgil as 

" Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum." 

He answered to the conditions in every one of the items : 
— I, a monster he was; 2, dreadful; 3, shapeless; 
4, huge ; 5, who had lost an eye. But why should that 
delight me? Had he been one of the Calendars ° in the 
" Arabian Nights," and had paid down his eye as the 
price of his criminal curiosity, what right had / to exult 
in his misfortune? I did not exult; I dehghted in no 
man's punishment, though it were even merited. But 
these personal distinctions (Nos. i, 2, 3, 4, 5) identified 
in an instant an old friend of mine whom I had known 
in the south for some years as the most masterly of mail- 
coachmen. He was the man in all Europe that could 
(if any could) have driven six-in-hand full gallop over Al 
Sirat ° — that dreadful bridge of Mahomet, with no side 
battlements, and of extra room not enough for a razor's 
edge — leading right across the bottomless gulf. Under 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 93 

this eminent man, whom in Greek I cognominated Cyclops 
Diphrelates (Cyclops the Charioteer), I, and others known 
to me, studied the diphrelatic art. Excuse, reader, a 
word too elegant to be pedantic. As a pupil, though I 
paid extra fees, it is to be lamented that I did not stand 
high in his esteem. It showed his dogged honesty 
(though, observe, not his discernment) that he could not 
see my merits. Let us excuse his absurdity in this par- 
ticular by remembering his want of an eye. Doubtless 
that made him blind to my merits. In the art of con- 
versation, however, he admitted that I had the whip-hand 
of him. On the present occasion great joy was at our 
meeting. But what was Cyclops doing here ? Had the 
medical men recommended northern air, or how? I 
collected, from such explanations as he volunteered, 
that he had an interest at stake in some suit-at-law now 
pending at Lancaster ; so that probably he had got him- 
self transferred to this station for the purpose of con- 
necting with his professional pursuits an instant readiness 
for the calls of his lawsuit. 

29. Meantime, what are we stopping for? Surely we 
have now waited long enough. Oh, this procrastinating 
mail, and this procrastinating post-office. Can't they 
take a lesson upon that subject from me ? Some people 
have called me procrastinating. Yet you are witness, 
reader, that I was here kept waiting for the post-office. 
Will the post-office lay its hand on its heart, in its mo- 
ments of sobriety, and assert that ever it waited for me ? 
What are they about? The guard tells me that there is 
a large extra accumulation of foreign mails this night, 
owing to irregularities caused by war, by wind, by 



94 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

weather, in the packet service, which as yet does not 
benefit at all by steam. For an extra hour, it seems, the 
post-office has been engaged in threshing out the pure 
wheaten correspondence of Glasgow, and winnowing it 
from the chaff of all baser intermediate towns. But at 
last all is finished. Sound your horn, guard ! Manches- 
ter, good-bye ! we've lost an hour by your criminal con- 
duct at the post-office : which, however, though I do not 
mean to part with a serviceable ground of complaint, and 
one which really is such for the horses, to me secretly is 
an advantage, since it compels us to look sharply for this 
lost hour amongst the next eight or nine, and to recover 
it (if we can) at the rate of one mile extra per hour. 
Off we are at last, and at eleven miles an hour ; and for 
the moment I detect no changes in the energy or in the 
skill of Cyclops. 

30. From Manchester to Kendal, which virtually 
(though not in law) is the capital of Westmoreland, there 
were at this time seven stages of eleven miles each. The 
first five of these, counting from Manchester, terminate 
in Lancaster; which is therefore fifty-five miles north of 
Manchester, and the same distance exactly from Liver- 
pool. The first three stages terminate in Preston (called, 
by way of distinction from other towns of that name, 
Pi'oud Preston) ; at which place it is that the separate 
roads from Liverpool and from Manchester to the north 
become confluent.^ Within these first three stages lay 
the foundation, the progress, and termination of our 

'^"Confluent": — Suppose a capital Y (the Pythagorean letter): 
Lancaster is at the foot of this letter; Liverpool at the top of the 
right branch; Manchester at the top of the left; Proud Preston at 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 95 

night's adventure. During the first stage, I found out 
that Cyclops was mortal : he was liable to the shocking 
affection of sleep — a thing which previously I had never 
suspected. If a man indulges in the vicious habit of 
sleeping, all the skill in aurigation ° of Apollo himself, 
with the horses of Aurora to execute his notions, avails 
him nothing. " Oh, Cyclops ! " I exclaimed, " thou art 
mortal. My friend, thou snorest." Through the first 
eleven miles, however, this infirmity — which I grieve to 
say that he shared with the whole Pagan Pantheon — be- 
trayed itself only by brief snatches. On waking up, he 
made an apology for himself which, instead of mending 
matters, laid open a gloomy vista of coming disasters. 
The summer assizes, he reminded me, were now going 
on at Lancaster : in consequence of which for three 
nights and three days he had not lain down on a bed. 
During the day he was waiting for his own summons as 
a witness on the trial in which he was interested, or else, 
lest he should be missing at the critical moment, was 
drinking with the other witnesses under the pastoral sur- 
veillance of the attorneys. During the night, or that 
part of it which at sea would form the middle watch, he 
was driving. This explanation certainly accounted for 
his drowsiness, but in a way which made it much more 
alarming ; since now, after several days' resistance to this 
infirmity, at length he was steadily giving way. Through- 
out the second stage he grew more and more drowsy. 

the centre, where the two branches unite. It is thirty-three miles 
along either of the two branches; it is twenty-two miles along the 
stem, — viz., from Preston in the middle to Lancaster at the root. 
There's a lesson in geography for the reader ! 



96 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

In the second mile of the third stage he surrendered 
himself finally and without a struggle to his perilous 
temptation. All his past resistance had but deepened 
the weight of this final oppression. Seven atmospheres ° 
of sleep rested upon him ; and, to consummate the case, 
our worthy guard, after singing " Love amongst the 
Roses " for perhaps thirty times, without invitation and 
without applause, had in revenge moodily resigned him- 
self to slumber — not so deep, doubtless, as the coach- 
man's, but deep enough for mischief. And thus at last, 
about ten miles from Preston, it came about that I found 
myself left in charge of his Majesty's London and Glas- 
gow mail, then running at the least twelve miles an hour. 
31. What made this neghgence less criminal than else 
it must have been thought was the condition of the roads 
at night during the assizes. At that time, all the law 
business of populous Liverpool, and also of populous 
Manchester, with its vast cincture of populous rural dis- 
tricts, was called up by ancient usage to the tribunal of 
Lilliputian Lancaster. To break up this old traditional 
usage required, i, a conflict with powerful established 
interests, 2, a large system of new arrangements, and 3, a 
new parliamentary statute. But as yet this change was 
merely in contemplation. As things were at present, 
twice in the year ^ so vast a body of business rolled north- 
wards from the southern quarter of the county that for a 
fortnight at least it occupied the severe exertions of two 
judges in its despatch. The consequence of this was 

1 ''Twice in the year" : — There were at that time only two assises 
even in the most populous counties — viz., the Lent Assizes and the 
Summer Assizes. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 97 

that every horse available for such a service, along the 
whole line of road, was exhausted in carrying down the 
multitudes of people who were parties to the different 
suits. By sunset, therefore, it usually happened that, 
through utter exhaustion amongst men and horses, the 
road sank into profound silence. Except the exhaustion 
in the vast adjacent county of York from a contested 
election, no such silence succeeding to no such fiery 
uproar was ever witnessed in England. 

32. On this occasion the usual silence and solitude 
prevailed along the road. Not a hoof nor a wheel was 
to be heard. And, to strengthen this false luxurious 
confidence in the noiseless roads, it happened also that 
the night was one of peculiar solemnity and peace. For 
my own part, though slightly alive to the possibilities of 
peril, I had so far yielded to the influence of the mighty 
calm as to sink into a profound reverie. The month 
was August ; in the middle of which lay my own birth- 
day — a festival to every thoughtful man suggesting 
solemn and often sigh-born ^ thoughts. The county was 
my own native county — upon which, in its southern 
section, more than upon any equal area known to man 
past or present, had descended the original curse of 
labour in its heaviest form, not mastering the bodies only 
of men, as of slaves, or criminals in mines, but working 
through the fiery will. Upon no equal space of earth 
was, or ever had been, the same energy of human power 
put forth daily. At this particular season also of the 

'^"Sigh-born" : — I owe the Fuggestion of this word to an obscure 
remembrance of a beautiful phrase in " Giraldus Cambrensis " — viz., 
suspir loses cogitationes. 



98 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

assizes, that dreadful hurricane of flight and pursuit, as it 
might have seemed to a stranger, which swept to and 
from Lancaster all day long, hunting the county up and 
down, and regularly subsiding back into silence about 
sunset, could not fail (when united with this permanent 
distinction of Lancashire as the very metropolis and 
citadel of labour) to point the thoughts pathetically upon 
that counter-vision of rest, of saintly repose from strife 
and sorrow, towards which, as to their secret haven, the 
profounder aspirations of man's heart are in solitude 
continually travelling. Obliquely upon our left we were 
nearing the sea; which also must, under the present 
circumstances, be repeating the general state of halcyon 
repose. The sea, the atmosphere, the light, bore each 
an orchestral part in this universal lull. Moonlight and 
the first timid tremblings of the dawn were by this time 
blending ; and the blendings were brought into a still more 
exquisite state of unity by a slight silvery mist, motion- 
less and dreamy, that covered the woods and fields, but 
with a veil of equable transparency. Except the feet of 
our own horses, — which, running on a sandy margin of the 
road, made but Httle disturbance, — there was no sound 
abroad. In the clouds and on the earth prevailed the 
same majestic peace ; and, in spite of all that the villain 
of a schoolmaster has done for the ruin of our sublimer 
thoughts, which are the thoughts of our infancy, we still 
believe in no such nonsense as a Hmited atmosphere. 
Whatever we may swear with our false feigning lips, in 
our faithful hearts we still believe, and must for ever 
believe, in fields of air traversing the total gulf between 
earth and the central heavens. Still, in the confidence 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 99 

of children that tread without fear every chamber in their 
father's house, and to whom no door is closed, we, in 
that Sabbatic vision which sometimes is revealed for an 
hour upon nights like this, ascend with easy steps from 
sorrow-stricken fields of earth upwards to the sandals of 
God. 

33. Suddenly, from thoughts like these I was awakened 
to a sullen sound, as of some motion on the distant 
road. It stole upon the air for a moment ; I listened in 
awe ; but then it died away. Once roused, however, I 
could not but observe with alarm the quickened motion 
of our horses. Ten years' experience had made my eye 
learned in the valuing of motion ; and I saw that we 
were now running thirteen miles an hour. I pretend to 
no presence of mind. On the contrary, my fear is that I 
am miserably and shamefully deficient in that quahty as 
regards action. The palsy of doubt and distraction 
hangs like some guilty weight of dark unfathomed re- 
membrances upon my energies when the signal is flying 
for action. But, on the other hand, this accursed gift I 
have, as regards thought, that in the first step towards the 
possibiUty of a misfortune I see its total evolution ; in 
the radix of the series I see too certainly and too instantly 
its entire expansion ; in the first syllable of the dreadful 
sentence I read already the last. It was not that I feared 
for ourselves. Us our bulk and impetus charmed against 
peril in any collision. And I had ridden through too 
many hundreds of perils that were frightful to approach, 
that were matter of laughter to look back upon, the first 
face of which was horror, the parting face a jest — for 
any anxiety to rest upon our interests. The mail was 

LOFC. 



100 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

not built, I felt assured, nor bespoke, that could betray 
77te who trusted to its protection. But any carriage that 
we could meet would be frail and Hght in comparison of 
ourselves. And I remarked this ominous accident of 
our situation, — we were on the wrong side of the road. 
But then, it may be said, the other party, if other there 
was, might also be on the wrong side ; and two wrongs 
might make a right. That was not hkely. The same 
motive which had drawn us to the right-hand side of the 
road — viz., the luxury of the soft beaten sand as con- 
trasted with the paved centre — would prove attractive 
to others. The two adverse carriages would therefore, 
to a certainty, be travelling on the same side ; and from 
this side, as not being ours in law, the crossing over to 
the other would, of course, be looked for from us} Our 
lamps, still lighted, would give the impression of vigilance 
on our part. And every creature that met us would rely 
upon us for quartering."^ All this, and if the separate 
links of the anticipation had been a thousand times more, 
I saw, not discursively, or by effort, or by succession, but 
by one flash of horrid simultaneous intuition. 

34. Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the 
evil which viight be gathering ahead, ah ! what a sullen 
mystery of fear, what a sigh of woe, was that which stole 

1 It is true that, according to the law of the case as estabUshed by 
legal precedents, all carriages were required to give way before royal 
equipages, and therefore before the mail, as one of them. But this 
only increased the danger, as being a regulation very imperfectly made 
known, very unequally enforced, and therefore often embarrassing the 
movements on both sides. 

^''Quartering" : — This is the technical word, and, I presume, 
derived from the French cartayer, to evade a rut or any obstacle. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH lOI 

upon the air, as again the far-off sound of a wheel was 
heard ! A whisper it was — a whisper from, perhaps, four 
miles off — secretly announcing a ruin that, being fore- 
seen, was not the less inevitable ; that, being known, was 
not therefore healed. What could be done — who was 
it that could do it — to check the storm-flight of these 
maniacal horses? Could I not seize the reins from the 
grasp of the slumbering coachman? You, reader, think 
that it would have been in your power to do so. And I 
quarrel not with your estimate of yourself. But, from 
the way in which the coachman's hand was viced be- 
tween his upper and lower thigh, this was impossible. 
Easy was it? See, then, that bronze equestrian statue. 
The cruel rider has kept the bit in his horse's mouth for 
two centuries. Unbridle him for a minute, if you please, 
and wash his mouth with water. Easy was it ? Unhorse 
me, then, that imperial rider ; knock me ° those marble 
feet from those marble stirrups of Charlemagne. 

35. The sounds ahead strengthened, and were now 
too clearly the sounds of wheels. Who and what could 
it be ? Was it industry in a taxed cart ? Was it youth- 
ful gaiety in a gig? Was it sorrow that loitered, or joy 
that raced? For as yet the snatches of sound were too 
intermitting, from distance, to decipher the character of 
the motion. Whoever were the travellers, something 
must be done to warn them. Upon the other party rests 
the active responsibility, but upon us — and, woe is me ! 
that us was reduced to my frail opium-shattered self — 
rests the responsibility of warning. Yet, how should this 
be accomplished? Might I not sound the guard's horn? 
Already, on the first thought, I was making my way over 



102 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

the roof of the guard's seat. But this, from the accident 
which I have mentioned, of the foreign mails being piled 
upon the roof, was a difficult and even dangerous attempt 
to one cramped by nearly three hundred miles of outside 
travelling. And, fortunately, before I had lost much time 
in the attempt, our frantic horses swept round an angle 
of the road which opened upon us that final stage where 
the collision must be accomplished and the catastrophe 
sealed. All was apparently finished. The court was 
sitting ; the case was heard ; the judge had finished ; and 
only the verdict was yet in arrear. 

36. Before us lay an avenue straight as an arrow, six 
hundred yards, perhaps, in length ; and the umbrageous 
trees, which rose in a regular line from either side, meet- 
ing high overhead, gave to it the character of a cathedral 
aisle. These trees lent a deeper solemnity to the early 
light ; but there was still light enough to perceive, at the 
further end of this Gothic aisle, a frail reedy gig, in 
which were seated a young man, and by his side a young 
lady. Ah, young sir ! what are you about ? If it is req- 
uisite that you should whisper your communications to 
this young lady — though really I see nobody, at an hour 
and on a road so solitary, likely to overhear you — is it 
therefore requisite that you should carry your lips forward 
to hers ? The little carriage is creeping on at one mile 
an hour ; and the parties within it, being thus tenderly 
engaged, are naturally bending down their heads. Be- 
tween them and eternity, to all human calculation, there 
is but a minute and a half. Oh heavens ! what is it that 
I shall do ? Speaking or acting, what help can I offer ? 
Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the tale might 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 103 

seem laughable, that I should need a suggestion from the 
" Iliad " to prompt the sole resource that remained. 
Yet so it was. Suddenly I remembered the shout of 
Achilles,^ and its effect. But could I pretend to shout 
like the son of Peleus, aided by Pallas ? No : but then I 
needed not the shout that should alarm all Asia militant; 
such a shout would suffice as might carry terror into the 
hearts of two thoughtless young people and one gig-horse. 
I shouted — and the young man heard me not. A second 
time I shouted — and now he heard me, for now he raised 
his head. 

37, Here, then, all had been done that, by me, could 
be done ; more on my part was not possible. Mine had 
been the first step ; the second was for the young man ; 
the third was for God. If, said I, this stranger is a brave 
man, and if indeed he loves the young girl at his side — or, 
loving her not, if he feels the obhgation, pressing upon 
every man worthy to be called a man, of doing his utmost 
for a woman confided to his protection — he will at least 
make some effort to save her. If that fails, he will not 
perish the more, or by a death more cruel, for having made 
it ; and he will die as a brave man should, with his face to 
the danger, and with his arm about the woman that he 
sought in vain to save. But, if he makes no effort, — 
shrinking without a struggle from his duty, — he himself 
will not the less certainly perish for this baseness of pol- 
troonery. He will die no less : and why not ? Wherefore 
should we grieve that there is one craven less in the world ? 
No ; let him perish, without a pitying thought of ours 
wasted upon him ; and, in that case, all our grief will be 
reserved for the fate of the helpless girl who now, upon the 



104 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

least shadow of failure in hi7n, must by the fiercest of 
translations — must without time for a prayer — must 
within seventy seconds — stand before the judgment-seat 
of God. 

38. But craven he was not : sudden had been the call 
upon him, and sudden was his answer to the call. He 
saw, he heard, he comprehended, the ruin that was com- 
ing down : already its gloomy shadow darkened above 
him ; and already he was measuring his strength to deal 
with it. Ah ! what a vulgar thing does courage seem when 
we see nations buying it and selling it for a shiUing a-day : 
ah ! what a sublime thing does courage seem when some 
fearful summons on the great deeps of life carries a man, 
as if running before a hurricane, up to the giddy crest of 
some tumultuous crisis from which lie two courses, and a 
voice says to him audibly, " One way lies hope ; take the 
other, and mourn for ever ! " How grand a triumph if, 
even then, amidst the raving of all around him, and the 
frenzy of the danger, the man is able to confront his situa- 
tion — is able to retire for a moment into soHtude with God, 
and to seek his counsel from Him / 

39. For seven seconds, it might be, of his seventy, the 
stranger settled his countenance steadfastly upon us, as if 
to search and value every element in the conflict before 
him. For five seconds more of his seventy he sat immov- 
ably, like one that mused on some great purpose. For 
five more, perhaps, he sat with eyes upraised, like one 
that prayed in sorrow, under some extremity of doubt, for 
light that should guide him to the better choice. Then 
suddenly he rose ; stood upright ; and, by a powerful strain 
upon the reins, raising his horse's fore-feet from the ground, 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 105 

he slewed him round on the pivot of his hind-legs, so as 
to plant the little equipage in a position nearly at right 
angles to ours. Thus far his condition was not improved ; 
except as a first step had been taken towards the possibility 
of a second. If no more were done, nothing was done ; 
for the Httle carriage still occupied the very centre of our 
path, though in an altered direction. Yet even now it 
may not be too late : fifteen of the seventy seconds may 
still be unexhausted ; and one almighty bound may avail 
to clear the ground. Hurry, then, hurry ! for the flying 
moments — they hurry. Oh, hurry, hurry, my brave young 
man ! for the cruel hoofs of our horses — they also hurry ! 
Fast are the flying moments, faster are the hoofs of our 
horses. But fear not for him, if human energy can suffice ; 
faithful was he that drove to his terrific duty ; faithful was 
the horse to his command. One blow, one impulse 
given with voice and hand, by the stranger, one rush from 
the horse, one bound as if in the act of rising to a fence, 
landed the docile creature's fore-feet upon the crown or 
arching centre of the road. The larger half of the little 
equipage had then cleared our overtowering shadow: 
that was evident even to my own agitated sight. But it 
mattered little that one wreck should float off in safety if 
upon the wreck that perished were embarked the human 
freightage. The rear part of the carriage — was that 
certainly beyond the fine of absolute ruin? What power 
could answer the question? Glance of eye, thought of 
man, wing of angel, which of these had speed enough to 
sweep between the question and the answer, and divide 
the one from the other? Light does not tread upon the 
steps of light more indivisibly than did our all-conquering 



I06 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

arrival upon the escaping efforts of the gig. That must 
the young man have felt too plainly. His back was now 
turned to us ; not by sight could he any longer communicate 
with the peril ; but, by the dreadful rattle of our harness, 
too truly had his ear been instructed that all was finished 
as regarded any effort of his. Already in resignation he 
had rested from his struggle ; and perhaps in his heart he 
was whispering, " Father, which art in heaven, do Thou 
finish above what I on earth have attempted." Faster 
than ever mill race we ran past them in our inexorable 
flight. Oh, raving of hurricanes that must have sounded 
in their young ears at the moment of our transit ! Even 
in that moment the thunder of collision spoke aloud. 
Either with the swingle-bar, or with the haunch of our 
near leader, we had struck the off-wheel of the Httle gig ; 
which stood rather obliquely, and not quite so far advanced 
as to be accurately parallel with the near-wheel. The 
blow, from the fury of our passage, resounded terrifically. 
I rose in horror, to gaze upon the ruins we might have 
caused. From my elevated station I looked down, and 
looked back upon the scene ; which in a moment told 
its own tale, and wrote all its records on my heart for 
ever. 

40. Here was the map of the passion that now had 
finished. The horse was planted immovably, w^ith his 
fore-feet upon the paved crest of the central road. He 
of the whole party might be supposed untouched by the 
passion of death. The little cany carriage — partly, per- 
haps, from the violent torsion of the wheels in its recent 
movement, partly from the thundering blow we had given 
to it — as if it sympathised with human horror, was all 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 107 

alive with tremblings and shiverings. The young man 
trembled not, nor shivered. He sat like a rock. But 
his was the steadiness of agitation frozen into rest by 
horror. As yet he dared not to look round ; for he knew 
that, if anything remained to do, by him it could no 
longer be done. And as yet he knew not for certain if 
their safety were accomphshed. But the lady 

41. But the lady ! Oh, heavens ! will that spectacle 

ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon 
her seat, sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven, 
clutched at some visionary object in the air, fainting, pray- 
ing, raving, despairing? Figure to yourself, reader, the 
elements of the case ; suffer me to recall before your 
mind the circumstances of that unparalleled situation. 
From the silence and deep peace of this saintly summer 
night — from the pathetic blending of this sweet moon- 
light, dawnlight, dreamlight — from the manly tenderness 
of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love — suddenly 
as from the woods and fields — suddenly as from the 
chambers of the air opening in revelation — suddenly as 
from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her, 
with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crowned phan- 
tom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger 
roar of his voice. 

42. The moments were numbered; the strife was 
finished ; the vision was closed. In the twinkling of an 
eye, our flying horses had carried us to the termination 
of the umbrageous aisle ; at the right angles we wheeled 
into our former direction ; the turn of the road carried 
the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into 
my dreams for ever. 



I08 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 



Section the Third — Dream- Fugue : 
founded on the preceding theme of sudden death 

" Whence the sound 
Of instruments, that made melodious chime, 
Was heard, of harp and organ; and who moved 
Their stops and chords was seen; his volant touch 
Instinct through all proportions, low and high. 
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue." 

— Par. Lost, Bk. XI. 

Turn ultuosissim amente 

43. Passion of sudden death ! that once in youth I read 
and interpreted by the shadows of thy averted signs ^ ! — 
rapture of panic taking the shape (which amongst tombs 
in churches I have seen) of woman bursting her sepulchral 
bonds — of woman's Ionic form° bending forward from 
the ruins of her grave with arching foot, with eyes upraised, 
with clasped adoring hands — waiting, watching, trem- 
bling, praying for the trumpet's call to rise from dust for 
ever ! Ah, vision too fearful of shuddering humanity on 
the brink of almighty abysses ! — vision that didst start 
back, that didst reel away, like a shrivelling scroll from 
before the wrath of fire racing on the wings of the wind ! 
Epilepsy so brief of horror, wherefore is it that thou canst 
not die ? Passing so suddenly into darkness, wherefore 
is it that still thou sheddest thy sad funeral blights upon 
the gorgeous mosaics of dreams? Fragment of music 
too passionate, heard once, and heard no more, what 

'^''Averted signs": — I read the course and changes of the lady's 
agony in the succession of her involuntary gestures ; but it must be 
remembered that I read all this from the rear, never once catching the 
lady's full face, and even her profile imperfectly. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 109 

aileth thee, that thy deep rolling chords come up at 
intervals through all the worlds of sleep, and after forty 
years have lost no element of horror ? 



44. Lo, it is summer — almighty summer ! The ever- 
lasting gates of life and summer are thrown open wide ; 
and on the ocean, tranquil and verdant as a savannah 
the unknown lady from the dreadful vision and I myself 
are floating — she upon a fairy pinnace, and I upon an 
English three-decker. Both of us are wooing gales of 
festal happiness within the domain of our common 
country, within that ancient watery park, within the path- 
less chase of ocean, where England takes her pleasure as 
a huntress through winter and summer, from the rising to 
the setting sun. Ah, what a wilderness of floral beauty 
was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic 
islands through which the pinnace moved ! And upon 
her deck what a bevy of human flowers : young women 
how lovely, young men how noble, that were dancing 
together, and slowly drifting towards us amidst music and 
incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous 
corymbi° from vintages, amidst natural carolling, and the 
echoes of sweet girlish laughter. Slowly the pinnace 
nears us, gaily she hails us, and silently she disappears 
beneath the shadow of our mighty bows. But then, as at 
some signal from heaven, the music, and the carols, and 
the sweet echoing of girhsh laughter — aU are hushed. 
What evil has smitten the pinnace, meeting or overtaking 
her? Did ruin to our friends couch within our own 
dreadful shadow? Was our shadow the shadow of death ? 



no THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

I looked over the bow for an answer, and, behold ! the 
pinnace was dismantled ; the revel and the revellers were 
found no more ; the glory of the vintage was dust ; and 
the forests with their beauty were left without a 
witness upon the seas. *' But where," and I turned to 
our crew — " where are the lovely women that danced 
beneath the awning of flowers and clustering corymbi? 
Whither have fled the noble young men that danced with 
them ? " Answer there was none. But suddenly the 
man at the mast-head, whose countenance darkened 
with alarm, cried out, *' Sail on the weather beam ! 
Down she comes upon us : in seventy seconds she also 
will founder." 

II 

45. I looked to the weather side, and the summer had 
departed. The sea was rocking, and shaken with gath- 
ering wrath. Upon its surface sat mighty mists, which 
grouped themselves into arches and long cathedral aisles. 
Down one of these, with the fiery pace of a quarrel ° from 
a cross-bow, ran a frigate right athwart our course. " Are 
they mad? " some voice exclaimed from our deck. " Do 
they woo their ruin? " But in a moment, as she was 
close upon us, some impulse of a heady current or local 
vortex gave a wheeling bias to her course, and ofl" she 
forged without a shock. As she ran past us, high aloft 
amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the pinnace. The 
deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, towering 
surges of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce to 
catch her. But far away she was borne into desert spaces 
of the sea : whilst still by sight I followed her, as she ran 
before the howling gale, chased by angry sea-birds and 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH m 

by maddening billows ; still I saw her, as at the moment 
when she ran past us, standing amongst the shrouds, with 
her white draperies streaming before the wind. There 
she stood, with hair dishevelled, one hand clutched 
amongst the tackling — rising, sinking, fluttering, trem- 
bling, praying ; there for leagues I saw her as she stood, 
raising at intervals one hand to heaven, amidst the fiery 
crests of the pursuing waves and the raving of the storm ; 
until at last, upon a sound from afar of malicious laughter 
and mockery all was hidden for ever in driving showers ; 
and afterwards, but when I knew not, nor how. 

Ill 

46. Sweet funeral bells ° from some incalculable dis- 
tance, wailing over the dead that die before the dawn, 
awakened me as I slept in a boat moored to some familiar 
shore. The morning twilight even then was breaking; 
and, by the dusky revelations which it spread, I saw a 
girl, adorned with a garland of white roses about her 
head for some great festival, running along the solitary 
strand in extremity of haste. Her running was the run- 
ning of panic; and often she looked back as to some 
dreadful enemy in the rear. But, when I leaped ashore, 
and followed on her steps to warn her of a peril in front, 
alas ! from me she fled as from another peril, and vainly 
I shouted to her of quicksands that lay ahead. Faster, 
and faster she ran ; round a promontory of rocks she 
wheeled out of sight ; in an instant I also wheeled round 
it, but only to see the treacherous sands gathering above 
her head. Already her person was buried ; only the fair 
young head and the diadem of white roses around it were 



112 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

still visible to the pitying heavens ; and, last of all, was 
visible one white marble arm. I saw by the early twi- 
light this fair young head, as it was sinking down to 
darkness — saw this marble arm, as it rose above her 
head and her treacherous grave, tossing, faltering, ris- 
ing, clutching, as at some false deceiving hand stretched 
out from the clouds — saw this marble arm uttering her 
dying hope, and then uttering her dying despair. The 
head, the diadem, the arm — these all had sunk ; at last 
over these also the cruel quicksand had closed ; and no 
memorial of the fair young girl remained on earth, ex- 
cept my own solitary tears, and the funeral bells from the 
desert seas, that, rising again more softly, sang a requiem 
over the grave of the buried child, and over her blighted 
dawn. 

47. I sat, and wept in secret the tears that men have 
ever given to the memory of those that died before the 
dawn, and by the treachery of earth, our mother. But 
suddenly the tears and funeral bells were hushed by a 
shout as of many nations, and by a roar as from some 
great king's artillery, advancing rapidly along the valleys, 
and heard afar by echoes from the mountains. " Hush ! " 
I said, as I bent my ear earthwards to listen — "hush ! — 
this either is the very anarchy of strife, or else" — and 
then I hstened more profoundly, and whispered as I 
raised my head — " or else, oh heavens ! it is victory that 
is final, victory that swallows up all strife." 

IV 

48. Immediately, in trance, I was carried over land 
and sea to some distant kingdom, and placed upon a 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 113 

triumphal car, amongst companions crowned with laurel. 
The darkness of gathering midnight, brooding over all 
the land, hid from us the mighty crowds that were weav- 
ing restlessly about ourselves as a centre : we heard them, 
but saw them not. Tidings had arrived, within an hour, 
of a grandeur that measured itself against centuries ; too 
full of pathos they were, too full of joy, to utter them- 
selves by other language than by tears, by restless an- 
thems, and Te Deiims reverberated from the choirs and 
orchestras of earth. These tidings we that sat upon the 
laurelled car had it for our privilege to pubhsh amongst 
all nations. And already, by signs audible through the 
darkness, by snortings, and tramplings, our angry horses, 
that knew no fear or fleshly weariness, upbraided us with 
delay. Wherefore was it that we delayed? We waited 
for a secret word, that should bear witness to the hope 
of nations as now accomphshed for ever. At midnight 
the secret word arrived ; which word was — Waterloo and 
Recovered Christendom ! ° The dreadful word shone by 
its own light ; before us it went ; high above our leaders' 
heads it rode, and spread a golden light over the paths 
which we traversed. Every city, at the presence of the 
secret word, threw open its gates. The rivers were con- 
scious as we crossed. All the forests, as we ran along 
their margins, shivered in homage to the secret word. 
And the darkness comprehended it. 

49. Two hours after midnight we approached a mighty 
Minster. Its gates, which rose to the clouds, were closed. 
But, when the dreadful word that rode before us reached 
them with its golden light, silently they moved back upon 
their hinges ; and at a flying gallop our equipage entered 



114 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

the grand aisle of the cathedral. Headlong was our pace ; 
and at every altar, in the little chapels and oratories to 
the right hand and left of our course, the lamps, dying or 
sickening, kindled anew in sympathy with the secret word 
that was flying past. Forty leagues we might have run 
in the cathedral, and as yet no strength of morning light 
had reached us, when before us we saw the aerial galleries 
of organ and choir. Every pinnacle of fretwork, every 
station of advantage amongst the traceries, was crested 
by white-robed choristers that sang deliverance ; that wept 
no more tears, as once their fathers had wept ; but at in- 
tervals that sang together to the generations, saying, 

" Chant the deliverer's praise in every tongue," 
and receiving answers from afar, 

" Such as once in heaven and earth were sung." 

And of their chanting was no end ; of our headlong pace 
was neither pause nor slackening. 

50. Thus as we ran hke torrents — thus as we swept 
with bridal rapture over the Campo Santo ^ of the cathe- 

1 "Campo Santo " : — It is probable that most of my readers will be 
acquainted with the history of the Campo Santo (or cemetery) at Pisa, 
composed of earth brought from Jerusalem from a bed of sanctity as 
the highest prize which the noble piety of crusaders could ask or im- 
agine. To readers who are unacquainted with England, or who (being 
English) are yet unacquainted with the cathedral cities of England, it 
may be right to mention that the graves within-side the cathedrals often 
form a fiat pavement over which carriages and horses might run ; and 
perhaps a boyish remembrance of one particular cathedral, across which 
I had seen passengers walk and burdens carried, as about two centuries 
back they were through the middle of St. Paul's in London, may have 
assisted my dream. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH I15 

dral graves — suddenly we became aware of a vast 
necropolis rising upon the far- oif horizon — a city of sep- 
ulchres, built within the saintly cathedral for the warrior 
dead that rested from their feuds on earth. Of purple 
granite was the necropolis ; yet, in the first minute, it lay 
like a purple stain upon the horizon, so mighty was the 
distance. In the second minute it trembled through 
many changes, growing into terraces and towers of won- 
drous altitude, so mighty was the pace. In the third 
minute already, with our dreadful gallop, we were entering 
its suburbs. Vast sarcophagi rose on every side, having 
towers and turrets that, upon the limits of the central 
aisle, strode forward with haughty intrusion, that ran back 
with mighty shadows into answering recesses. Every sar- 
cophagus showed many bas-reliefs — bas-rehefs of battles 
and of battle-fields ; battles from forgotten ages, batdes 
from yesterday ; battle-fields that, long since, nature had 
healed and reconciled to herself with the sweet oblivion of 
flowers ; battle-fields that were yet angry and crimson with 
carnage. Where the terraces ran, there did we run ; where 
the towers curved, there did tve curve. With the flight of 
swallows our horses swept round every angle. Like rivers 
in flood wheeling round headlands, like hurricanes that ride 
into the secrets of forests, faster than ever Hght unwove the 
mazes of darkness, our flying equipage carried earthly pas- 
sions, kindled warrior instincts, amongst the dust that lay 
around us — dust oftentimes of our noble fathers that had 
slept in God from Cr^cy to Trafalgar. And now had we 
reached the last sarcophagus, now were we abreast of 
the last bas-relief, already had we recovered the arrow- 
like flight of the inimitable central aisle, when coming up 



Il6 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

this aisle to meet us we beheld afar off a female child, 
that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers. The mists 
which went before her hid the fawns that drew her, but 
could not hide the shells and tropic flowers with which she 
played — but could not hide the lovely smiles by which she 
uttered her trust in the mighty cathedral, and in the cheru- 
bim that looked down upon her from the mighty shafts of 
its pillars. Face to face she was meeting us ; face to face 
she rode, as if danger there were none. " Oh, baby ! " I 
exclaimed, "shalt thou be the ransom for Waterloo? Must 
we, that carry tidings of great joy to every people, be 
messengers of ruin to thee ! " In horror I rose at the 
thought ; but then also, in horror at the thought, rose one 
that was sculptured on a bas-relief — a Dying Trum- 
peter.° Solemnly from the field of battle he rose to his 
feet; and, unslinging his stony trumpet, carried it, in 
his dying anguish, to his stony lips — sounding once, 
and yet once again ; proclamation that, in thy ears, oh 
baby! spoke from the battlements of death. Immedi- 
ately deep shadows fell between us, and aboriginal silence. 
The choir had ceased to sing. The hoofs of our horses, 
the dreadful rattle of our harness, the groaning of our 
wheels, alarmed the graves no more. By horror the bas- 
relief had been unlocked unto life. By horror we, that 
were so full of life, we men and our horses with their fiery 
fore-legs rising in mid air to their everlasting gallop, were 
frozen to a bas-reUef. Then a third time the trumpet 
sounded ; the seals were taken off all pulses ; life, and the 
frenzy of life, tore into their channels again ; again the 
choir burst forth in sunny grandeur, as from the muflling 
of storms and darkness; again the thunderings of our 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 117 

horses carried temptation into the graves. One cry burst 
from our lips, as the clouds, drawing off from the aisle, 
showed it empty before us. — " Whither has the infant 
fled? — is the young child caught up to God?" Lo ! afar 
off, in a vast recess, rose three mighty windows to the 
clouds ; and on a level with their summits, at height in- 
superable to man, rose an altar of purest alabaster. On 
its eastern face was trembling a crimson glory. A glory 
was it from the reddening dawn that now streamed 
through the windows ? Was it from the crimson robes of 
the martyrs painted on the windows? Was it from the 
bloody bas-reliefs of earth ? There, suddenly, within that 
crimson radiance, rose the apparition of a woman's head, 
and then of a woman's figure. The child it was — grown 
up to woman's height. CHnging to the horns of the altar, 
voiceless she stood — sinking, rising, raving, despairing ; 
and behind the volume of incense that, night and day, 
streamed upwards from the altar, dimly was seen the fiery 
font, and the shadow of that dreadful being who should 
have baptized her with the baptism of death. But by her 
side was kneeling her better angel, that hid his face with 
wings ; that wept and pleaded for her ; that prayed when 
she could 7iot; that fought with Heaven by tears for her 
deliverance ; which also, as he raised his immortal coun- 
tenance from his wings, I saw, by the glory in his eye, 
that from Heaven he had won at last. 

V 

51. Then was completed the passion of the mighty 
fugue. The golden tubes of the organ, which as yet had 
but muttered at intervals — gleaming amongst clouds 



Il8 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

and surges of incense — threw up, as from fountains un- 
fathomable, columns of heart-shattering music. Choir 
and anti-choir were filling fast with unknown voices. 
Thou also, Dying Trumpeter, with thy love that was 
victorious, and thy anguish that was finishing, didst enter 
the tumult ; trumpet and echo — farewell love, and fare- 
well anguish — rang through the dreadful sane tics ° Oh, 
darkness of the grave ! that from the crimson altar and 
from the fiery font wert visited and searched by the 
effulgence in the angel's eye — were these indeed thy 
children? Pomps of life, that, from the burials of cen- 
turies, rose again to the voice of perfect joy, did ye in- 
deed mingle with the festivals of Death? Lo ! as I 
looked back for seventy leagues through the mighty 
cathedral, I saw the quick and the dead that sang to- 
gether to God, together that sang to the generations of 
man. All the hosts of jubilation, like armies that ride in 
pursuit, moved with one step. Us, that, with laurelled 
heads, were passing from the cathedral, they overtook, 
and, as with a garment, they wrapped us round with 
thunders greater then our own. As brothers we moved 
together; to the dawn that advanced, to the stars that 
fled ; rendering thanks to God in the highest — that, 
having hid His face through one generation behind thick 
clouds of War, once again was ascending, from the 
Campo Santo of Waterloo was ascending, in the visions of 
Peace : rendering thanks for thee, young girl ! whom 
having overshadowed with His ineffable passion of death, 
suddenly did God relent, suffered thy angel to turn aside 
His arm, and even in thee, sister unknown ! shown to me 
for a moment only to be hidden for ever, found an occa- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 119 

sion to glorify His goodness. A thousand times, amongst 
the phantoms of sleep, have I seen thee entering the 
gates of the golden dawn, with the secret word riding 
before thee, with the armies of the grave behind thee, — 
seen thee sinking, rising, raving, despairing ; a thousand 
.times in the worlds of sleep have I seen thee followed 
by God's angel through storms, through desert seas, 
through the darkness of quicksands, through dreams and 
the dreadful revelations that are in dreams ; only that at 
the last, with one sling of His victorious arm,° He might 
snatch thee back from ruin, and might emblazon in thy 
deliverance the endless resurrections of His love I 



NOTES 



JOAN OF ARC 

This essay was originally published in the March and August num- 
bers of Taifs Edinburgh Magazine in 1849, at a time when De Quincey 
was contributing regularly to Taifs. During this same year he con- 
tributed Notes on Walter Savage Landor, Schlosser's Literary History 
of the Eighteenth Century, Milton versus Southey and Landor, Ortho- 
graphic Mutineers, The Spanish Military Nun, and Protestantism. 

In preparing the Collective Edition of his writings De Quincey made 
many alterations in this essay, which appeared in the third volume 
published in 1854. The present text is that of the Collective Edition. 

Joan of Arc. When Joan of Arc left the solitude of Domremy for a 
" station in the van of armies," France was on the verge of extinction 
as a nation. For a hundred years the miserable nation had been in the 
throes of war. England had been fighting for the right to govern France, 
and France had been fighting for her existence. In the decisive battles 
of Crecy, Poictiers, and Agincourt, France had lost her courage, had 
poured out her best blood, and had exhausted her resources, England 
had become undisputed master of Normandy, and internal strife had 
driven Burgundy to support England's claims. Henry V. of England 
had entered Paris and had been recognized as sovereign of France by 
the States-General of the realm. Such was the condition, when, upon 
the death of Charles VI. of France, the Dauphin was declared king by 
the national party. He found his authority restricted to the territory 
south of the Loire ; and the city of Orleans, the last stronghold of 
France, besieged by the allied forces of England and Burgundy, was 
preparing to surrender. Weak and disheartened, the reckless Dauphin 
was upon the point of leaving the country when Joan of Arc presented 
herself and told him that she had come to conduct him to Rheims to be 
crowned. 

1 The notes are grouped under numbers corresponding to the numbers of the 
paragraphs in the text. 

120 



JOAN OF ARC 121 

Joan of Arc, or Jeanne d'Arc, was born in or near the year 1411, iil 
Domremy, a town which lay partly in Lorraine and partly in Cham- 
pagne, Her father was a proprietary peasant of the town, with a mind 
turned to the material things of life; and Joan grew up without educa- 
tion except in the prayers and creed of the church, which were taught 
her by her mother. She could sew and spin, but could not read or write. 
Joan was of a serious, imaginative disposition, devout and dutiful. She 
spent much time in prayer and in meditation over the distresses of her 
unhappy country. At the age of thirteen she heard what seemed to her 
Heavenly Voices, and these continued to invoke her to devote herself 
to her country's aid. She decided that it was her duty to relieve Orleans 
and to conduct Charles to Rheims to be crowned. Accordingly, this 
simple unlettered peasant girl presented herself at the gay court of the 
pusillanimous Dauphin and proffered her assistance. After much hesi- 
tancy on the part of Charles and his advisers, she was put in command 
of about five thousand men, and sent to the relief of beleaguered Orleans, 
She entered the city at the head of her troops on April 29, 1429, As a 
result of her success the French placed confidence in her, believing in 
the genuineness of her inspiration. The English, on the contrary, attrib- 
uted her success to the assistance of the devil. Disheartened at the 
prospect of having to cope with the powers of evil, on May 8, they raised 
the siege and departed, only to be pursued by the enthusiastic French, 
who defeated them in the decisive battle of Patay and compelled them 
to retire beyond the Loire. 

On July 17, Charles was crowned at Rheims, and Joan, believing that 
her mission was accomplished, wished to retire to her native Domremy 
and resume the old life with her parents. The French, however, would 
not willingly let go one whom they hoped might be instrumental in utterly 
crushing their old enemy and expelling her from the land. They pre- 
vailed upon the Maid to remain, although she avowed that in carrying 
out their wishes she was no longer led by the Heavenly Voices. She 
was no less devoted to the cause, but felt that her course was leading 
her to her doom. As a consequence, the old enthusiasm which she had 
inspired in the troops was gone. She was wounded in an attack on 
Paris in September, and in May of the following year was captured by 
the i^urgundians, who were adherents of the English. The Bishop of 
Beauvais, either through ambition or sheer malignity, and the University 
of Paris connived at her destruction, and the result was that Joan was 
sold to the English. She was turned over by them to the Inquisition to 
be tried as a heretic and a witch. Her judges, all but one of whom 



122 NOTES 

mere French churchmen, deemed her guilty and condemned her to be 
burned. She was pardoned ; but her keepers conspired to induce her 
to assume again her male attire, which led to a second condemnation, 
and as a result she was burned alive in the market place of Rouen 
May 30, 1431. 

(i) Like the Hebrew shepherd boy. David left his flocks in the 
care of a keeper and went to carry provisions to his brothers who were 
in the army with Saul. He found the army in dismay because of the 
challenge of the Philistine giant, Goliath. He decided to meet the 
dreaded enemy himself, and after some hesitancy Saul permitted him to 
go. For the full account see i Samuel xvii. 

In what does the parallel between the girl of Domrhny a?id the boy of 
Bethlehem consist? 

Observe instances of De Quincey's use of Biblical language. What is 
the effect produced by it ? 

Vaucouleurs. A town near Domremy. 

Apparitors. The summoning officers attendant upon ecclesiastical 
courts. 

En contumace. A legal term meaning " in contempt of court," 
applied to one who fails to appear when summoned. 

As even yet may happen. Joan of Arc has almost universally been 
accepted as the historical heroine of France. Her sentence of condem- 
nation as a sorceress was revoked by a decree of the Pope only twenty- 
five years after her death. During the centuries that have elapsed since, 
Joan's hold upon the popular mind in France has grown slowly but 
steadily. De Quincey is induced to write in her defence rather because 
he desires to attack Michelet than because the Maid needs to be de- 
fended. 

(2) Great was the throne of France. It was, doubtless, the most 
splendid court in Christendom. 

The lilies of France. A reference to the fieurs-de-lis, the national 
emblem under the monarchy. 

Combined to wither them. When the French monarchy was over- 
thrown by the Revolution of 1789, the fleurs-de-lis were supplanted by 
the tricolor. 

What is the dominant feeling that De Quincey creates for his heroine ? 
By what means, largely f 

What effect has his choice of stately words a?id phrases ? 

(3) M. Michelet. Jules Michelet (1798-1874) was a French historian 
and controversialist. He was made professor of history in the College 



JOAN OF ARC 123 

de France in 1838. His principal historical writings are the History of 
France, History of the French Revolution, and Women of the Revolution. 
These works are noted for vivacity and brilliancy. His controversial 
works are marked by eloquence, sarcasm, sentiment, and strong bias. 
It is not strange that a contentious writer of this character should 
arouse the feelings of a polemic contemporary like De Quincey. 

Revolutionary cast. The French writers of this period represent a 
literary movement corresponding in many ways to the Romantic Revival 
in England. Though De Quincey was largely in accord with the poetic 
side of that movement, as a Tory he could not view leniently its political 
doctrines. He railed at Whigs, Republicans, Radicals, Revolutionists, 
and " the faction of Jacobinism through its entire gamut." 

Recovered liberty. In the Revolution of 1830 the Bourbon monarchs 
were expelled and France again became a republic. 

The book against priests. Upon assuming his duties as professor 
of history in the College de France in 1848, Michelet began a series of 
controversial lectures attacking the Jesuits. These lectures were subse- 
quently published in three volumes. The first one was The Jesuites ; 
the second, the one referred to by De Quincey, Priests, Women, and the 
Families; and the third, The People. 

Chevy Chase. One of the most famous old English ballads of the 
seventeenth century. There are two versions of the poem. The hnes 
here parodied run as follows : — 

" The stout erle of Northumberland 
A vow to God did make 
His pleasure in the Scottish woods 
Three sommers days to take." 

Draperies of asbestos were cleansed. It is said that Charlemagne 
had a table-cloth of asbestos, which, to the astonishment of his guests, 
he threw into the fire after the meal was over. 

Explain De Quincey' s attitude toward M. Michelet. How severe is 
his criticism ? What elements of humor do you find? What spirit moves 
De Quincey in this essay ? 

(4) La Pucelle. This is the French word for " maid " or " virgin." 
After the relief of Orleans, Joan of Arc was called La Pucelle d'Orleans, 
a designation which became permanent. 

All the documents. This suggests something of De Quincey's 
method. It is quite usual for him to lay out all the details, even to the 
slightest minutiae, essential to the understanding of his case, before he 
presents the case itself. 



124 NOTES 

The collection. This work is Quicherat's Proces de Condamnatlon et 
Rehabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc, five volumes. The first volume appeared 
in 1841 and the last in 1849. 

Hannibal. The famous Carthaginian general. When he was only 
nine years old his father, Hamilcar, made him swear eternal enmity to 
Rome. He won the admiration of Rome by his daring enterprise in 
leading a vast army across the Alps in 217 B.C. He hved in a continual 
state of war with the great empire. In the end he took poison to avoid 
being carried away captive to Rome. 

Mithridates. A warlike king of Pontus, who was hostile to Roman 
sovereignty in the East. To avoid falling into the hands of the Romans, 
having failed in an attempt at suicide by poison, he ordered a soldier to 
run him through with the sword. The honor accorded him was the royal 
funeral which the victorious Pompey ordered for him. 

Delenda est Anglia Victrix. " Victorious England must be de- 
stroyed." This is modelled after the words with which the elder Cato 
used to end his speeches of whatsoever nature, — Delenda est Carthago. 
It reveals De Quincey's idea of the attitude of the French toward England. 

Hyder Ali. A powerful prince of India. He was sultan of the state 
of Mysore, and a bloodthirsty rival of the English in India. His son 
met his fate in the battle of Seringapatam in 1799. 

Suffren. This French admiral came off victor in two engagements 
with the English. In 1780 he captured twelve merchant ships, and in 
the following year he won a victory over Commodore Johnstone. 

State in a single sentence the idea that De Quincey advances in this 
paragraph. What does he reveal of himself here? What confiection has 
this paragraph with his general purpose ? 

(5) Champenoise. The feminine form of Cha7npenois, an inhabit- 
ant of Champagne. 

What evidence of De Quincey's playful ?}tanner do you find in this 
paragraph f 

(6) The cis and the trans. Latin prefixes signifying " on this side," 
and " on that side," or " hither " and " farther." 

Decussated. This word was used by De Quincey, doubtless from 
the fact that a St. Andrew's cross is called in Latin crux decussata. 

Odious man's. For an explanation of De Quincey's attitude toward 
Joan's father, see paragraph 15. 

What is the relation of the discussion in this paragraph and the two 
that follow to the author' s general subject? What light does it throw on 
Joan's life? 



JOAN OF ARC 125 

(7) Crecy. This battle was fought in 1346. The flower of the 
French army, including twelve hundred knights and about thirty- 
thousand footmen, were cut down. Among the slain Lorrainers were 
Rudolf of Lorraine and the Count of Bar. 

Agincourt. The English under Henry V. won a decisive victory 
over the French, killing ten thousand men. Frederick of Lorraine was 
among the slain nobles. 

Nicopolis. In 1396 the sultan Bajazet defeated with great slaughter 
the allied forces of France, Poland, and Hungary, The Lorrainers 
again shared the fate of the defeated arms. 

(8) Explain the value of De Quincey's exposition in this paragraph. 
What is the feeling created by him ? What elements of descriptive power 

are shown here ? 

(9) Poictiers. In this battle Edward, the Black Prince, with only 
eight thousand men, captured the French king, defeating his army of 
nearly fifty thousand men. 

Withering overthrows. In these battles it was proved that the 
knight was not a match for the English footsoldiers with their bows 
and arrows, " From the day of Cressy feudalism tottered slowly but 
surely to its grave." — Green. 

The madness of the poor king. Charles VI. came to the throne in 
1380. He became insane in 1392 as a result, it is believed, of the 
experience here related by De Quincey. His uncles became engaged 
in a struggle over the conduct of the government, and brought on 
civil war. Henry V. of England seized this opportunity to invade 
France, and, after the battle of Agincourt, obtained a treaty by which 
he was to become king of France on the death of Charles VI. 

The famines, the extraordinary diseases, etc. Famines visited 
both France and England during the first half of the fourteenth century. 
Three times, also, during the century was Europe, or parts of it, visited 
by the terrible disease known as Black Death. Its first appearance in 
the south of France was in 1347, when it carried off half of the inhabit- 
ants. There was an insurrection of the peasantry in France in 1358, 

< known as the Insurrection of the Jacquerie, and one in England in 1381, 

' known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion. 

Termination of the Crusades. The date of the last Crusade is 1270. 
The real effects of the Crusades were the breaking up of feudalism, the 
freeing of the serfs, and the growth of nationaUty. 

Destruction of the Templars. Because of its corruption, the Order 
of the Temple was broken up by a decree of the Pope in 1312. Some 
of the leaders suffered death at the stake. 



V 



126 NOTES 

Papal interdicts. These are decrees of a pope, bishop, or ecclesi- 
astical council forbidding the rites of the church. In 1200 Innocent III. 
put all France under an interdict; all ecclesiastical services were 
suspended. 

The house of Anjou, or the Angevins, were famous for their deeds 
of violence. They were, moreover, well represented in the reigning 
families of Europe. 

By the Emperor. The Emperor Conradin tried to overthrow Charles 
of Anjou, who had usurped the Two Sicilies, but was captured and put 
to death by the usurper. The Emperor Sigismund, by his treachery, 
caused the burning of John Huss, and thus brought on the Hussite 
war. 

Spectacle of a double Pope. For a period of thirty-eight years after 
1378 there were two popes, one holding court at Avignon, France, the 
other at Rome. The " abominable " part of this consisted in the 
curses and foul charges the two hurled at each other. 

Vast rents. De Quincey refers to events which were preparing the 
way for the religious Reformation in Germany and in England. 

(10) By what means does De Quincey produce the poetic effects of this 
paragraph ? 

What are the traits of Joan's character suggested here ? 

How does De Quincey adapt his portrayal to the mystery of Joan's 
character ? 

What information does this paragraph give us of De Quincey — his 
tastes and abilities ? 

(11) Misereres. Penitential psalms. The Miserere is based upon 
the Fifty-first Psalm and begins with miserere, Latin for " have mercy." 

Te Deums. Hymns of praise. 

Those mysterious fauns. There are many tales of the Middle Ages 
which narrate incidents of knights who were led astray to fairyland by 
mysterious and elusive creatures of this nature. 

That ancient stag. Legends about the white st^g date back to early 
Greece. Charlemagne is said to have caught one white hart at Magde- 
burg and another in the woods of Holstein. " This chasing of the white 
doe or the white hart by the spectral huntsman has assumed various 
forms. According to Aristotle a white hart was killed by Agathocles, 
King of Sicily, which a thousand years beforehand had been conse- 
crated to Diana by Diomedes. Alexander the Great is said by Pliny 
to have caught a white stag, placed a collar of gold about its neck^ 
and afterward set it free. Succeeding heroes have in after days been 



JOAN OF ARC 127 

announced as the capturers of this famous white hart." — Hardwicke's 
Traditions. 

What light does the author throw on the visionary character of Joan 
in this paragraph ? 

What evidence is to be found here that the atithor loved Romance ? 

(13) What is the author's purpose in paragraphs g to ij ? 

(14) Bergereta. Mediaeval Latin for " shepherdess." 
What change in the atcthor's tone is evident here f 

What instance of assertion is there in the paragraph ? Of argument f 
Of playfulness? Of probable bias? 

(15) Chevalier, as-tu donne au cochon a manger? "Chevalier, 
have you fed the hog ?" The other French phrases read : " My daugh- 
ter, have you fed the hog ? " " Maid of Orleans, have you saved the 
fleurs-de-lis (France) ? " 

What is the real cause of De Quincey's dislike of D' Arc? 

(16) To what part of Joan's career is the author now passing? 

(17) Detection of the dauphin. Does De Quincey bring evidence of 
fact to prove his point? What is his real objection to accepting the report ? 
Is such an incident i?tconsistent with Joan's character ? 

Coup-d'essai. First test. 

Un peu fort. A little too much. 

The English boy. Henry VI., whose mother was Katherine, the 
oldest daughter of Charles VI. See note (9) on Charles VI. 

The ovens of Rheims. According to tradition all French kings 
must be crowned at Rheims, De Quincey here playfully mingles this 
tradition with the fame of the bake ovens of Rheims, noted for their 
biscuits and cakes. 

A parte ante. By anticipation. The phrase means literally " from 
the part before." 

Both trials. De Quincey refers to the trial of 1431, at which Joan 
was condemned, and to that of 1455, at which she was pronounced 
guiltless. 

What is his purpose? What is the point that De Quincey is making 
in this paragraph ? What do we learti here abotit the author's qualities 
of mind? 

(20) Coup-de-main. A sudden movement or attack. 

Why does De Quincey pass so rapidly over the deeds of Joan? 

(21) The inappreciable end. Inappreciable is here used, as invalu- 
able is often used, to mean too great to be properly appreciated. 

She pricks for sheriffs. The old custom was for the sovereign to 



128 NOTES 

select the sheriff of a county by striking, or "pricking," at random with 
a bodkin one of the names in a Hst of three prepared by the Lord Lieu- 
tenant. It appears that one out of the three was chosen, not two, as 
De Quincey states. 

What has the close of this paragraph to do with De Quincey s general 
purpose ? What is his motive in discussing this subject ? 

(22) Nolebat . . . She was unwilling to use her sword or to kill 
any one. 

What information about Joan' s character does this paragraph afford? 
What feeling toward Joan does De Quincey wish to arouse in the reader ? 

(23) Bishop of Beauvais. Pierre Cochon, who was driven from 
Beauvais as a traitor, went to Paris, where he became rector of the 
University. He was bought by the English with the promise of a 
bishopric. 

Triple crown. The papal tiara is encircled by three coronets. 

Judges examining the prisoner against himself. The French 
judges subject the prisoner to a severe examination before he is brought 
to trial. 

What evidences of De Quincey' s prejudices appear here? 

(24) What elements of the Maid's character are shown in this para- 
graph ? 

What information do we get about De Quincey as a writer here f In 
the next paragraph ? 

(26) Luxor. A temple constituting part of the ruins at Thebes, 
Egypt. It was one of the most magnificent specimens of ancient 
architectural creation. 

Marie Antoinette. Queen of Louis XVI., and daughter of Francis 
I., Emperor of Germany. She may be called daughter of the Caesars 
because, as German Emperor, her father was head of the Holy Roman 
Empire, and therefore, a Caesar. Marie Antoinette was executed in 

1793- 

Charlotte Corday. Inspired by a desire to free her country from the 
Reign of Terror, this girl of noble birth went to Paris and killed Marat, 
July 15, 1793. She was guillotined two days later. 

What evidence of De Quincey s romantic tastes do you find in this 
paragraph ? 

What is the author's purpose in this paragraph ? What effect is he 
trying to produce upon the reader ? 

(27) Grafton. Richard Grafton, who in 1569 published a Chronicle 
at large and meere History of the Affayres of Englande and the Kinges 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 



129 



of the Same. According to his account Joan M'as " a devilish witch 
and a fanaticall enchantresse," with a " foule [ugly] face." 

Holinshead. Holinshead's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and 
Ireland appeared in 1587. The interesting thing about the book is that 
it furnished much of the material for Shakespeare's English historical 
plays, 

(28) Is De Quincey in this paragraph and the following arguing for 
Joan's sake or for the sake of taking Af. Michelet to task? Give 
reasons for your opinion . 

(29) A priori. A priori reasoning proceeds from principles already 
known or assumed. 

Is De Quincey s reasoning convincing? Reproduce it. 

Which theory seems more consistent with Joan's life ? 

Explain why this is a fitting close to the controversial part of the essay. 

(31) Explaiti the propriety of this vision. In what sense is it a sum- 
mary ofJoa7z's life ? In what respects is it an estimate of her character ? 

(32) What spirit actuates the author ifi this final paragraph ? 

By what means does the author turn this paragraph into a characteriza- 
tion of Joan ? 

Would the close have been as strong if this last paragraph had been 
omitted? 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 

" In October, 1849, there appeared in Blackwood's Magazine an 
article entitled The Effglish M ail-Coach, or The Glory of Motion. 
There was no intimation that it was to be continued ; but in December, 
1849, there followed in the same magazine an article in two sections, 
headed by a paragraph explaining that it was by the author of the pre- 
vious article in the October number, and was to be taken in connection 
with that article. One of the sections of this second article was entitled 
The Vision of Sudden Death, and the other, Dream-Fugue on the above 
theme of Sudde?t Death. When De Quincey revised the papers in 
1854 for republication in Volume IV. of the Collective Edition of his 
writings, he brought the whole under the one general title of The Eng- 
lish Mail-Coach, dividing the text, as at present, into three sections or 
chapters, the first with the sub-title The Glory of Motion, the second with 
the sub-title The Vision of Sudden Death, and the third with the sub- 
title Dream-Fugue, founded on the preceding theme of Sudden Death. 



130 NOTES 

Great care was bestowed on the revision. Passages that had appeared 
in the magazine article were omitted; new sentences were inserted ; 
and the language was retouched throughout." — MasSON. 

(i) Mr. John Palmer. "Mr. John Palmer, a native of Bath, and 
from about 1768 the energetic proprietor of the Theatre Royal in that 
city, had been led, by the wretched state in those days of the means of 
intercommunication between Bath and London, and his own conse- 
quent difficulties in arranging for a punctual succession of good actors 
at his theatre, to turn his attention to the improvement of the whole 
system of Post-Office conveyance, and of locomotive machinery gener- 
ally, in the British Islands. The result was a scheme for superseding, 
on the great roads at least, the then existing system of sluggish and 
irregular stage-coaches, the property of private persons and companies, 
by a new system of government coaches, in connection with the Post- 
Office, carrying the mails and also a regulated number of passengers, 
with clockwork precision, at a rate of comparative speed, which he 
hoped should ultimately be not less than ten miles an hour. The 
opposition to the scheme was, of course, enormous ; coach proprietors, 
innkeepers, the Post-Office officials themselves, were all against Mr. 
Palmer; he was voted a crazy enthusiast and a public bore. Pitt, how- 
ever, when the scheme was submitted to him, recognized its feasibility ; 
on the 8th of August, 1784, the first mail-coach on Mr. Palmer's plan 
started from London at 8 o'clock in the morning and reached Bristol 
at II o'clock at night; and from that day the success of the new system 
was assured. — Mr. Palmer himself, having been appointed Surveyor 
and Comptroller-General of the Post-Office, took rank as an eminent 
and wealthy public man, M. P. for Bath and what not, and lived till 
1818." — Masson. 

He had married the daughter of a duke. " De Quincey makes it 
one of his [Mr. Palmer's] distinctions that he ' had married the daughter 
of a duke,' and in a footnote to that paragraph he gives the lady's name 
as ' Lady Madeline Gordon.' From an old Debrett, however, I learn 
that Lady Madelina Gordon, second daughter of Alexander, fourth 
Duke of Gordon, was first married, on the 3d of April, 1789, to Sir 
Robert Sinclair, Bart., and next, on the 25th of November, 1805, to 
Charles Palmer, of Lockley Parks, Berks, Esq. If Debrett is right, her 
second husband was not John Palmer of Mail-Coach celebrity, and De 
Quincey is wrong." — Masson. 

(2) Vast distances. Vastness and distance appealed strongly to De 
Quincey's imagination. He made much of these in The Flight of a 
Tartar Tribe. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 131 

Apocalyptic vials. The vials of the wrath of God. See Revelation 
xvi. 

Trafalgar. Off Cape Trafalgar in 1805, Admiral Nelson won a signal 
victory over the combined fleets of France and Spain. 

Salamanca. Near Salamanca Wellington defeated the French in the 
summer of 1812. 

Vittoria. Here Wellington again, in 1813, gave a crushing blow to 
the French forces, driving them back across the Pyrenees. 

What evlde?ices of De Qui?iceys romantic tastes does this paragraph 
contain f 

What indications that he liked to view things on a grand scale ? 

(3) Most universities, etc. Both Oxford and Cambridge Universi- 
ties are composed of a large number of separate colleges. Each college 
has its own faculty, but is subject to the general governing body of the 
University. 

Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act. " These might be called re- 
spectively the autumn, winter, spring, and summer terms. Michaelmas, 
the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, is on September 29. Hilary 
and Trinity are other names for Lent term and Act term respec- 
tively. Act term is the last term of the academic year ; its name is that 
originally given to a disputation for a Master's degree ; such disputa- 
tions took place at the end of the year generally, and hence gave a 
name to the summer term. Although the rules concerning residence 
at Oxford are more stringent than in De Quincey's time, only eighteen 
weeks' residence is required during the year, six in Michaelmas, six in 
Lent, and six in Easter and Act." — TURK, 

Going down. That is, going into the country. 

Attaint. Here used in its legal sense. The penalties of treason, 
unless suspended by an act of ParUament, extend to the descendants of 
the traitor. 

Pariahs. The pariah is a member of the lower caste of Hindoo 
society. He is regarded as an outcast by the higher castes. The social 
outcast early took a strong hold on De Quincey's mind. 

Salle-a-manger. Dining-hall, There are still many "privileged" 
dining rooms in English inns. 

What are the characteristics of De Quincey's humor as shown in this 
and following paragraphs ? 

What things here indicate that De Quincey was a good observer ? 

What phases of life seem especially to appeal to him? 

(4) Penumbra. A margin of partial shadow. 



132 NOTES 

(6) Great wits jump. "Great wits agree." Cf. Arragon's words in 
the Merchant of Venice : — 

" I will not jump with common spirits." 

Hammer-cloth. This is a cloth covering the driver's seat or box. 
Why it is so called is not definitely known. 

Fi Fi. " This paragraph is a caricature of a story told in Staunton's 
Account of the Earl of Macartney s Embassy to China in iy()2." — TURK. 

Does the humor of this paragraph lie in the story itself or in the man- 
ner of the narrative ? Just what are the things that jnake the account 
humorous f 

Which of the following adjectives apply to this humor : natural, deli- 
cate, playful, grotesque, mischievous, far-fetched, boisterous ? 

(7) Ca ira. A refrain of a popular song of the Revolution in France. 
Its literal meaning is, " It will go." 

Aristotle's, Zeno's, Cicero's. These men were all ethical teachers. 

(8) Noters and protesters. A noter is a notary. One of his func- 
tions is to protest notes, checks, and other financial papers, which 
are not paid when due. 

Astrological shadows. Impending misfortunes, due to the unlucky 
star under which one may have been born. 

House of life. In astrology the heavens are divided into sections 
called " houses of life." 

Von Troil's Iceland. This is evidently an error of memory on the 
part of De Quincey. The chapter referred to is to be found in Horre- 
bow's Natural History of Iceland, and reads as follows : — 
"Chapter LXII, Concerning Snakes. 

"There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island." 

Laesa majestas. An offence against sovereignty, accounted treason. 

What proof of the author's wide reading does this paragraph contain ? 

What things here may be considered pedantic ? Find other marks of 
pedantry in previous paragraphs. 

(9) Within benefit of clergy. The privilege of exemption from trial 
by a civil judge or court was claimed by the clergy, and finally extended 
to all persons capable of reading and writing. This privilege was 
entirely abolished in 1827. 

(11) A fortiori. Equivalent to "much more." Literally, it means 
" from stronger," with ^a«ja (reason) understood. 

Brummagem. This is a vulgar corruption of Birmingham. As Bir- 
mingham was noted for its manufacture of cheap wares, this corrupt 
form came to be a synonym for cheap, showy jewellery. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 133 

Jacobinical. To De Quincey this was a synonym for " revolutionary." 

(12) WAat qualities does De Quincey possess as a story-teller? As a 
jester? 

Do you find that De Quincey often detracts from the merit of his humor ? 
If so, by what fault ? 

(13) Magna loquimur. We speak great things. Magna vivimus, 
we experience great things. 

By culinary process. De Quincey refers to the boiling of the water 
to make steam. 

What is it that attracts De Quincey to the stage-coach ? 

What qualities of his character are shown in this preference for the 
stage-coach to the steam car ? 

What are his objections to the car ? 

(15) Say, all our praises. This line in Pope's Moral Essays reads : — 

" But all our praises why should Lords engross ? " 
What elements of real romance are there in this paragraph f 
What effect has the humor on the genui?teness of the romantic element? 
Which is the more natural, the hmnor or the romance ? Give reasons 
for your answer. 

(16) Cayman. From Spanish caiman, a tropical American alli- 
gator. 

(17) In what respects is this paragraph like a real dream ? 
What new side of De Quincey' s mind does this paragraph reveal? 
What is there playfully humorous about the picture? 

Do you find that it suggests at all the pathetic ? 

(19) Attelage. A French word meaning a "team "or "yoke" of 
horses or oxen. Here it includes the four horses and the coach to 
which they were attached. 

What are the chief features of this picture? 

By what means does De Quincey give life to the portrayal ? What is 
the nature of the vividness ? 

In what does the author exhibit his pride in what is English ? 

Which of his great antipathies is suggested in this and in the preceding 
paragraph ? 

(20) Bamet is in Hertfordshire, about eleven miles to the north of 
London. 

Charwomen. Chore women, women who work by the day. 
What is the dominatit impression that the author produces by this para- 
graph ? By what details does he produce it ? 

(21) Gazette. In earlier days this word was the name given to the 



134 NOTES 



ofificial organs of the government. In De Quincey's time it was applied 
to any official announcement, or news of governmental importance. 

W/iat is the effect of this picture on the previous exhilaratitig narra- 
tive ? 

(22) Fey. This is an Anglo-Saxon word. In Scotland the expres- 
sion " you are surely fey " is applied " to a person observed to be in 
extravagantly high spirits, or in any mood surprisingly beyond the 
bounds of his ordinary temperament, — the notion being that the excite- 
ment is supernatural and a presage of his approaching death or some 
other calamity about to befall him." — Masson. 

Imperfect one of Talavera. Wellington won a complete victory over 
the French at this place, in 1809, but was deprived of the fruits of his 
success through the inexcusable retreat of his Spanish allies under 
General Cuesta. 

Aceldama. The field of blood, the potter's field outside Jerusalem, 
bought with the money Judas received for betraying Christ. Hence, it 
means any place of blood. 

Which is the most vivid of the three pictures given in these paragraphs? 
Why? 

Which is most happy in its effect up07t the reader f 

Explain why De Quincey arranges them in the order he does. 

How are they a preparation for the following story ? 

What is the central idea of this first part of the essay? 

(23) Consummation . . . fervently to be desired. This is an echo 
from Hamlet's soliloquy, III. i. 60: — 

" To die, — to sleep, — 
No more ; and by a sleep to say we end 
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks 
That flesh is heir to, — 'ds a consummation 
Devoutly to be wished." 

Noblest of Romans. "The character of the 'mightiest Julius' is 
estimated by De Quincey in the essay on The Ccesars, one is glad to 
find, as he was by Shakspere, and as he has been by every fit modern 
authority, as the noblest of Roman men." — Masson, 

What relation has this discussion to the central idea of this part of the 
essay ? 

What characteristic of De Quincey's style is revealed in this discussion f 

Is the author's reasoning logical? Give reasons for your answer. 

(24) (SiaOavaros. From two Greek words, ^lavos meaning " vio- 
lent" and davaros meaning " death." 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 135 

Wkai do you think to be the author's motive in this explanation ? Is it 
pure pedantry ? 

What generalizatioti can you wake about the clearness and thorough- 
ness of De Qui7icey's explanations f 

(25) Chance of evading it. Compare this hypothetical case with the 
one the author describes later. 

What is the author's seeming purpose in dwelling upon this idea at this 
time ? 

In what way does this philosophizing prepare for the " vision " ? 

(26) Nature, from her seat, etc. This quotation is from the ninth 
book of Paradise Lost : — 

" So saying, her rash hand in evil hour 
Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck'd, she eat : 
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat 
Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe, 
That all was lost." 

What does De Quincey reveal of himself in this paragraph ? 
State the substance of the paragraph in a single sentence. 
What is the effect produced upon the mind of the reader by these last 
paragraphs ? 

(27) The down mail. The mail from London, The mail to Lon- 
don was the up mail. 

Jus dominii. Right of ownership. 
Jus gentium. Law of nations. 

What differences are apparent betweett the author's manner in this 
paragraph and in the preceding ? 

What is the effect of the change on the reader'' s interest? 
What romantic circumstances does the author introduce ? What ele- 
ments of humor ? 

(28) Assessor. By derivation this word means " one who sits 
beside." 

Calendars. The calendars, or dervishes, are Mohammedan monks 
who devote their lives to preaching, going from place to place, living 
entirely upon alms. 

Al Sirat. This is the bridge, according to the Mohammedan faith, 
over which souls pass to the next world. It is so narrow that the wicked 
fall off into the bottomless pit. 

What effect is produced by the description of the driver f 

What kind of expectancy is aroused in the reader ? By what means ? 



136 NOTES 

What is it that makes these paragraphs genuinely interesting? 

(29) What is the author's purpose in eviphasizlng the loss of an hour ? 
What expectancy is aroused by the remark, " For the moment I detect 

no changes in the energy or in the skill of the Cyclops " ? 

(30) Aurigation. This is a word of De Quincey's coining. Its 
literal meaning is charioteering. What is the effect of its use here ? 

Seven atmospheres. The pressure of one atmosphere is fifteen 
pounds to the square inch. 

Point out and explain some other humorous expressions. 

What is the feeling that De Quincey tries to arouse in the reader by the 
preparatory details given at the close of this paragraph ? 

By what means does he suggest coming trouble? 

(31) What is the effect of this digression on the reader ? 
What does it reveal of the author's habits ofmitid? 

(32) What are the romantic characteristics of the situation? Of the 
scene ? 

What is the effect of the meditative mood of De Quincey at this time ? 
What produces the effect of mystery ? 

(33) What is the atithor s purpose in speaking of his inability to act? 
By what means does he create suspense throughout the paragraph ? 
Do you find details that do not aid the author's purpose? 

What is the author s purpose in suggesting that the coming vehicle is 
four miles off? 

(34) Knock me. This use of me is common among the old writers. 
(36) Shout of Achilles. This is a reference to the terror which 

Achilles struck to the Trojans. In Pope's .translation the account runs 
as follows : — 

" Forth marched the chief, and distant from the crowd, 
High on the rampart raised his voice aloud ; 
With her own shout Minerva swells the sound, 
Troy starts astonished, and the shores rebound. . . . 
Thrice from the trench his dreadful voice he raised, 
And thrice they fled, confounded and amazed." 
By what means does De Quincey make us feel the seriousness of the 
situation ? 

(37-40) What is De Quincey's object in movi?tg so slowly toward the 
crisis ? 

In what way does the author reveal his own personal feelings? Are 
they made prominefit ? 

What is the author's chief purpose in this narrative ? 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 137 

Upon just what does he centre our interest ? 

By what details does he make us feel most strongly the situation ? 

(43) Woman's Ionic form. The Ionic is considered the most grace- 
ful and finely beautiful of the three styles of classical Greek architec- 
ture. 

What effect is produced by the use here of apostrophe as a literary form f 

(44) Corymbi. The plural of corymbus, a cluster of flowers, or of 
fruit. 

Explain by what elements of the preceding narrative, the various phases 
of this dream are suggested. 

(45) Quarrel. The shaft from a crossbow, an arrow with a four- 
edged head. 

Point otct the chief differences between this dream and the preceding. 

(46-47) Funeral bells. Read the passage aloud and try to give 
expression to the soft, solemn music of the opening, which gradually 
changes, turning in the end into the tumultuous movement of a paean 
of victory. 

In what respects is this like a real dream ? 

By what incidents of the preceding narrative are the various phases of 
this dreatn suggested ? 

(48) Waterloo and Recovered Christendom ! This indicates the great 
relief felt by England over the outcome of the Continental struggle. 
De Quincey as a rigid Tory experienced double delight in the event. 

Show how this dream follows naturally from the preceding. 

Show that the facts for its foundation are contained i?i the incidents of 
the preceding parts of the essay. 

(50) A Dying Trumpeter. " The incident of the dying trumpeter, 
who rises from a marble bas-relief, and carries a marble trumpet to his 
marble lips for the purpose of warning the female infant, was doubtless 
secretly suggested by my own imperfect effort to seize the guard's horn 
and to blow a warning blast." — De Quincey. 

By what means does the author make this dream fnore mysterious than 
the preceding dreams ? 

Does the added mystery increase the effectiveness f Give your reasons. 
In what does the vividness of the passage consist? 
Explain the meaning of the close of this dreain. 

(51) The dreadful sanctus. The hymn Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God 
of Hosts. 

Which of the dreams is inore vivid? 

By what means are the dreams made vivid ? 



138 NOTES 

One sling of His victorious arm. This is an echo of Milton : — 
" At one sling 
Of thy victorious arm, well pleasing Son, 
Both Sin and Death, and yawning Grave, at last, 
Through Chaos hurled, obstruct the mouth of Hell, 
For ever, and seal up his ravenous jaws," 

— Paradise Lost, X. 663. 

AUTHOR'S COMMENTS 

In revising this essay, in 1854, for the Collective Edition of his works 
the author prefixed the following explanations : — 

"' The E7iglish Mail-Coach' : — This little paper, according to my 
original intention, formed part of the ' Suspiria de Profundis,' from 
which, for a momentary purpose, I did not scruple to detach it, and to 
publish it apart, as sufficiently intelligible even when dislocated from its 
place in a larger whole. To my surprise, however, one or two critics, 
not carelessly in conversation, but deliberately in print, professed their 
inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links 
of the connection between its several parts. I am myself as little able 
to understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking obscurity, 
as these critics found themselves to unravel my logic. Possibly I may 
not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case. I will therefore 
sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according to my original design, 
and then leave the reader to judge how far this design is kept in sight 
through the actual execution. 

" Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, accident made me, in the 
dead of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness to 
an appalling scene, which threatened instant death in a shape the most 
terrific to two young people whom I had no means of assisting, except 
in so far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of their 
danger ; but even that not until they stood within the very shadow of the 
catastrophe, being divided from the most frightful of deaths by scarcely 
more, if more at all, than seventy seconds. 

" Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which the whole of this 
paper radiates as a natural expansion. This scene is circumstantially 
narrated in Section the Second, entitled ' The Vision of Sudden Death.' 

" But a movement of horror, and of spontaneous recoil from this 
dreadful scene, naturally carried the whole of that scene, raised and 
idealised, into my dreams, and very soon into a rolling succession of 
dreams. The actual scene, as looked down upon from the box of the 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH 139 

mail, was transformed info a dream, as tumultuous and changing as a 
musical fugue. This troubled dream is circumstantially reported in 
Section the Third, entitled ' Dream-Fugue upon the theme of Sudden 
Death.' What I had beheld from my seat upon the mail ; the scenical 
strife of action and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there wit- 
nessed them moving in ghostly silence; this duel between life and 
death, narrowing itself to a point of such exquisite evanescence as the 
collision nearcd ; all these elements of the scene blended, under the law 
of association, with the previous and permanent features of distinction 
investing the mail itself: which features at that time lay — ist, in velocity 
unprecedented ; 2dly, in the power and beauty of the horses ; sdly, in the 
official connection with the government of a great nation ; and 4thly, in 
the function, almost a consecrated function, of publishing and diffusing 
through the land the great political events, and especially the great 
battles during a conflict of unparalleled grandeur. These honorary dis- 
tinctions are all described circumstantially in the First or Introductory 
Section (' The Glory of Motion ') . The three first were distinctions 
maintained at all times; but the fourth and grandest belonged exclu- 
sively to the war with Napoleon ; and this it was which most naturally 
introduced Waterloo into the dream. Waterloo, I understood, was the 
particular feature of the ' Dream-Fugue ' which my censors were least 
able to account for. Yet surely Waterloo, which, in common with every 
other great battle, it had been our special privilege to publish over all 
the land, most naturally entered the dream under the licence of our privi- 
lege. If not — if there be anything amiss — let the Dream be responsible . 
The Dream is a law to itself; and as well quarrel with a rainbow for 
showing, or for not showing, a secondary arch. So far as I know, every 
element in the shifting movements of the Dream derived itself either 
primarily from the incidents of the actual scene, or from secondary fea- 
tures associated with the mail. For example, the cathedral aisle derived 
itself from the mimic combination of features which grouped themselves 
together at the point of approaching collision — viz. an arrow-like sec- 
tion of the road, six hundred yards long, under the solemn lights de- 
scribed, with lofty trees meeting overhead in arches. The guard's horn 
again — a humble instrument in itself — was yet glorified as the organ of 
publication for so many great national events. And the incident of the 
Dying Trumpeter, who rises from a marble bas-relief, and carries a 
marble trumpet to his marble lips for the purpose of warning the female 
infant, was doubtless secretly suggested by my own imperfect effort to 
seize the guard's horn, and to blow a warning blast. But the Dream 
knows best; and the Dream, I say again, is the responsible party." 



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